The blog of author Dennis Cooper

Brains

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Yoan Capote Open Mind, 2008
“Open Mind” is a project to build an underground park made with walls, constructing a labyrinth similar to the human brain. People become metaphors for neurons transmitting information as they walk around the maze.

 

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Yeo Shih Yun Mind Ink Painting Machine V2.0, 2020
In her work titled “Mind Ink Painting Machine,” Yeo transforms the electrical impulses in her brain into compelling, abstract video art. Visually stimulating, the 17-minute piece showcases particles which are reminiscent of brush strokes coalescing with each other and then breaking apart, almost like crashing waves. An immersive and seemingly eerie electronic track lingers in the background. The ambient track, as it turns out, was composed by a close friend of Yeo’s, Andy Yang, a musician and artist, using the Chapman Stick, an electrical music instrument with 10 to 12 individually tuned strings that was devised in the early ’70s by jazz musician Emmet Chapman. The development of Yeo’s work involves two parts. She began with the development of the “ink” in the video, which requires a total of 100,000 particles to appear as a smooth, fluid simulation. She then used the EEG sensors to translate the human brainwaves and converted them into data for the ink painting. The raw data was processed in TouchDesigner, software for visual programming, and used to control the data stream for the simulation. Subsequently, the data from the simulation was passed into an Open Graphics Library which rendered the network to create the final digital ink paintings.

 

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Olga Chernysheva Waiting for a Miracle, 2000
Printed large in glorious colour is a row of photographs of Russian women wearing bobble hats. There’s a fuzzy red one, a woolly brown one, one with red stripes against black and another with raised white stripes. Seen from behind, these hand-knitted globes look like a newly discovered breed of sea anemone or a display of exotic cacti.

 

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Don Cain Mens Amplio, 2013
In Oakland, California, a group of artists are building a massive, interactive brain sculpture that’s meant to be controlled by only one thing: an actual brain. The sculpture, titled Mens Amplio — Latin for “expanding the mind” — is going to be 15 feet tall and will be able to glow, flash colors and patterns, and even shoot out fire. The brain is being constructed from twirling metal tubes and LEDs, and will be housed inside of a large wireframe head. The plan is to showcase the Mens Amplio at different events, allowing spectators to control the brain by wearing an attached EEG headset, which measures electrical fluctuations on the skull as a way of indirectly detecting brain activity.

 

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Yaron Steinberg the brain/city project, 2011
Steinberg has created a giant sculpture of his brain, as he imagines it to be: “It is basically a city inside my brain that has all this different neighborhoods working together to form the city as one thing. I tried to create a platform for me to describe my inner world. It is an object used as a personal diary, an arena were events and worlds are working in symbiosis with one another and form a texture of life”, he says. The sculpture is made out of cardboxes he found in the streets, it is 1,40m high and 1,60m long and contains an electric train, a tape recorder and Christmas lights.

 

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Jan Fabre The Artist Who Tries to Drive His Own Brain Forward, 2007
Silicone, textiles, oak and paint.

 

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Christoph Keller Hypnosis Film Project, 2007
In 2006 Keller began assembling an archive of hypnosis scenes from the history of cinema. A striking number of films contain hypnosis scenes and in most of these scenes, the directors do not resist the temptation of wanting to hypnotise the audience along with the actor as it were. For Hypnosis Film Project (2007), Keller compiled an 18-minute cinematic hypnosis session from sequences extricated from their original plots and are narrowed down to their pure hypnotic principles.

Watch the film here

 

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Jeromina Juan gory brain cap, 2011
I know, I know, another caulking project from me?! I couldn’t resist, especially because it was so easy to turn a regular fitted ball cap into a bloody brain with my caulking gun. It’s best to study pictures of the human brain before tackling this project in order to best mimic the brain’s convolution patterns when caulking the cap.

 

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Jonathan Lasker BRAIN, ANTI-BRAIN, 1987
oil on canvas

 

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Olaf Mooij Braincar, 2011
‘braincar’ is a mobile sculpture created by rotterdam artist olaf mooij, featuring a large brain-like extrusion on the back of a modified used car. by day, the vehicle captures and stores images and video from its travels. by night, this footage is remixed, projected from within the brain sculpture and visible from the outside.

 

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Ursula Damm Chromatographic Ballads, 2013
Chromatographic Orchestra is an artistic installation which allows a visitor to direct a software framework with an EEG device. In an exhibition environment with semi-transparent video screens a visitor is sitting in an armchair and learns to navigate unconsciously – with his/her brain waves the parameter space of our software – Neurovision. Neurovision interacts with live video footage of the location of the exhibition and its surroundings. By navigating with his/her own brain waves the visitor can define and navigate the degree of abstraction of a generative (machine learning) algorithm, performed on the footage of different, nearby video cameras.

 

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Katharina Fritsch Brain, 1989
plaster

 

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Isa Genzken Mein Gehirn (My Brain), 1984
synthetic polymer paint on plaster, metal

 

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Johan Deckmann The Hypnosis (Record Version), 2016
Johan explained that his psychological practice has great influence on his art. It not only serves as a tremendous inspiration for the content of his works but also as a constant reminder of personal responsibility. “I meet many people who suffer from a circumstance that they themselves have created but they choose not to take action,” he added. “I think it’s tragicomic that underneath our frustration and self-slavery lies this beautiful opportunity.”‘

 

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Guy Viner Axl Rose and Girlfriend Kissing Under X-Ray, 2008
Viner used a CT scan and X-ray machine to photograph the rock star couple.

 

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Ron English Glass Jaw, 2021
From the mind of Ron English emerges his latest twist on reality! Weighing in at a whopping 8 lbs, standing tall at 11 inches, cast from realistically colored solid high impact resin, for the first time in the world, see a full-size brain cast inside of a perfectly recreated boxing glove… The Glass Jaw!

 

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Marvin Gaye Chetwynd Brain Bug, 2014
As the name suggests, at least part of the shape resembles a giant brain or possibly the end of a penis. And it’s main facial features bear quite a lot of resemblance to genitalia; it has quite an obscene orifice. It actually looks a lot more obscene in its source, which is the film Starship Troopers. I’ve seen the relevant scenes on YouTube and the Brain Bug is this denizen of another planet that has telepathic powers and whose sustenance is essentially the brain of others, particularly it seems unsuspecting human visitors to this planet. And the Brain Bug has a host of bug like warriors and is very much like the queen bee in a bee colony you know so everybody depends on but also protects this big thing. In terms of a sculpture its framework is almost like a rudimentary tent. The original in the sci-fi film is very slimy and visceral, while this is made out of, I guess, cotton sheets and canvas and stuffing. It’s very improvised, like all of Marvin’s sculptures and props and installations, and quite painterly, harking back to her training as a painter.

 

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John Baldessari Brain/Cloud with Palm Tree, 2019
A recurrent motif throughout his practice, a cloud was first depicted in the painting God Nose, 1965, in which the artist juxtaposed an image of the sky with an abstracted human body part. The use of isolating body parts became a continuous theme within Baldessari’s practice. Brain/Cloud takes this one step further, directly comparing the shape of the human brain to that of a cloud, exemplifying Baldessari’s proposition that unembodied physical features become newly strange, abstract, and morph into other things.

 

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Anatoliy Kharkhurin/Tovy Harhur What the brain!, 2017
This video collage entertains the idea of vanity of scientific inquiry. The voice in the background lectures about the structure and functioning of the brain. The lecture is accompanied by images of the living brain and brain parts diagrams, which together represent the ‘scientific’ approach to human psyche. These images are juxtaposed with video clips of Leize Jenius artists’ performances representing potential (and rather unpredictable) content of the psyche.

 

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Ilya Filatov Fucking Brain, 2014
We are our brain. Consumption of endless information, scrolling tapes, causes “cheap dopamine”. Due to the abundance of information in our environment, the brain meets its needs, spending less and less neural connections in the cortex. Endless orgasm and pleasure. We lose the ability to think.

 

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Pierre Huyghe Of Ideal, 2019
They’ve been described as the stuff of nightmares but Pierre Huyghe’s Mental Image works are derived from the thoughts of waking subjects. Participants were asked to look at pictures or conjure thoughts of life forms, prehistoric tools, machines, artworks and other entities while their brains were scanned by a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine at Kyoto University’s Kamitani Lab. These scans were then fed to a neural network, computer software that interpreted them by comparing them to a database of pictures taken in the real world. The rapid sequence of amorphous images, reminiscent of foetal fauna or sprouting flora, that Huyghe exhibits are amalgams of the images the neural network sifts through as it attempts to match the visual information from the brain scans.

 

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Christopher Wool Maggie’s Brain, 1995
In Maggie’s Brain, the aluminum support is silkscreened, overpainted with white, silkscreened a second time, and then topped with an explosive, floral-like spray in the center. Multiple references—from the allover compositions of Abstract Expressionism to the cool, silkscreened surfaces of Pop Art—reflect Wool’s engagement with the history of painting.

 

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Jinah Roh Mater Ex Machina, 2019
Media artist Jinah Roh’s Mater Ex Machina (2019) travels into the realms of the brain and its power and its interface with human culture via a creepy robot (a green-eyed bald head with puttylike skin on top of an armour-plated, female-breasted metal torso; limbs absent) that looks like the stuff of nightmares.

 

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Various Horror’s Brains, ?

 

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Anne Lindberg Old Brain, 2005
Thread, 650 pounds, 28′ x 5′ x 8″

 

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Eva Lee and Aaron Trocola Dual Brains, 2018
“Dual Brains” is an OpenBCI real-time brain data-driven performance, conceived for Art-A-Hack collaboration and led by Eva Lee. Inspired by neuroscientific research which indicates that human brains are fundamentally hard wired for empathy, especially under conditions of duress. The performers’ brain data is visually presented while they focus their minds on emotionally charged memories, first without physical contact and then while holding hands. Sound created from EEG and ECG data. Performance duration, 3 minutes.

 

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Hannah Hallam-Eames Spilled brains / synthetic circuits, 2016
I once watched this bizarre TED talk where a surgeon was attempting to perform a head transplant. It was very Frankenstein. In my mind, I pictured brains spilling out of the patient’s head like spaghetti. I thought about how then, as though cybernetic, the soft matter would be mashed together with electrical wires then fused together to allow the body’s circuit board to function. I thought about the clunkiness of motherboards on computers and how they operate much like bodies do.

Eames melted these pieces of plastic and mixed their contents together by hand. The plastic orbs were attached to a beam on the ceiling and moved in a clockwise direction through a motor. These kinds of motorised sculptures can be temperamental and often come together through a process of trial and error with the outcome often being a surprise to the artist. Yet this particular work seems to represent the illogical nature of power structures, which have somehow been deemed ‘logical’.

 

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Jean-Michel Rolland BRAIN MUSIC, 2017
The raw data of a Neurosky Mindwave EEG is used here to play generative music. Incoming raw data from the EEG is divided into 512 samples covering brain waves from 1 to 50Hz. These 512 samples trigger piano notes when their values are beyond the decided limit. As the performer enters into meditation, his brain waves cool down and thereby, he’s able to increase their amplification. The musical score and its rhythm are certainly depending on his mood and on the environment, but the performer’s real challenge is to focus his mind entirely on the registered sounds, in order to enter into a closed musical loop where his brain waves – translated into sound waves – become the reflection of the registered notes and so on.

 

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Raymond Pettibon Two drawings, 2013

 

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Roger Hiorns Untitled, 2011
Roger Hiorns’ wall sculptures consist of metal racks acting as receptacles for dark-brown bricks that turn out to be bovine brain matter. It has been rendered down, freeze-dried, injected with chemicals. Hiorns is interested in brain matter, mainly because of its incomprehensible structure. The fact that human beings try to fathom the structure of the brain, with their own brain, is a paradox. Hiorns visits the cows at the abattoir and talks to them immediately before they are killed. This way, through their memory of the meeting, Hiorns becomes encapsulated in the structure of their brain.

 

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Refik Anadol Melting Memories, 2018
Media artist Refik Anadol’s work Melting Memories combines data paintings, light projections, and augmented data sculptures to visibly demonstrate how the brain recalls memories. The installation was created with a custom 16 x 20 foot LED media wall and CNC milled rigid foam, and was shown earlier in 2018 at Pilevneli Galleryin Istanbul. In the work, seething swirls move across the work’s surface, resembling cresting ocean waves, blossoming flowers, and shifting sand. o generate the data, Anadol conducted experiments at the Neuroscape Laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco. An artist statement describes the technical process: “Anadol gathers data on the neural mechanisms of cognitive control from an EEG (electroencephalogram) that measures changes in brain wave activity and provides evidence of how the brain functions over time. These data sets constitute the building blocks for the unique algorithms that the artist needs for the multi-dimensional visual structures on display.”

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Ferdinand, Hi. Yeah, it seems to be getting hairier up here in Europe in general. Fucking hell. But you’ll be fine, obviously. Good luck getting things spotless painlessly. ** Misanthrope, Hi. It could be worse, which isn’t to say it doesn’t suck and that I’m not putting on the best face about itlike I tend to do, but, yeah, super high hopes that it doesn’t get harsher. Diva kids tend to grow up productive and successful and all that stuff. So, cool. Not so cool about your slurring and unsteadiness, but it sounds like a little keeper for the memory banks. ** _Black_Acrylic, Great, congrats! Ben the Phoenix! That’s what I like to hear. ** David Ehrenstein, Indeed. And the trippy parts of ‘The Right Stuff’ too. I thought you were referring to Joe LeSueur. I was friends with Joe in his later life. What a funny, lovely guy. ** Sypha, It takes a big man to admit that, ha ha. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, I feel like there’s something going on with BE that has stamina and a future, but we’ll see. Champagne and fireworks about killing your deadline! I don’t know how well known Jackie Beat is outside of LA. I know she and Sherry Vine and doing a lot of duo stuff these days. Sherry was one of the stars of a performance piece I made with Ishmael Houston-Jones back in 1989 when she was still a young guy named Keith Levy. I don’t know how much early Jackie Beat is online, probably not much, but she used to be mean as hell. Ha ha, I would eat that Buche lickety-split even though, mermen, yikes! Love giving every male escort in the world a shaved bubble butt that shoots confetti every fifteen minutes like a cuckoo clock, G. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Gotcha. Maybe someone will curate that post. I might, but I’m not feeling it, right now at least. ‘Elevated’ is certainly putting a positive spin on that new horror genre. New reviews! Everyone, Mr. Erickson has given his thoughts about and spin to two items. First, an older Ken Loach film called ‘Black Jack’ here, and then the new serpentwithfeet album here. I haven’t heard Meemo Comma’s new album, and you have definitely intrigued me. I will approach it both excitedly and warily, thank you. ** Danielle, Hi, Danielle! It’s been ages, or it feels like ages, and it’s so swell to see you! Whoa, you read ‘I Wished’? That is sneaky, ha ha. I think you’re only the fourth person (that I know of) aside from my agent and publishing people who’ve read it. Eek. Wow, that’s so amazing to hear. Thank you so much. That’s really, really moving, what you wrote. And what I dared hope for. Yeah, it was a tough and intense novel to write. Anyway, yeah, I’m so happy, thank you so very much for telling me that. I’m totally happy to Zoom or whatever whenever you like. I seem to be stuck here in Paris for a while yet, and I’m just futzing around and working inside the confinement. Gosh, Danielle, really, thank you, that really means a lot. Bear hugs for days. ** John Newton, Hi. Glad you liked his films. Happy b’day to your mom! Tim D. was a pretty energetic and extroverted and fun and highly smart person exactly as his poems seem to indicate. No, ‘I Wished’ has been fully written for a long time. I’m not writing poems, no, I wish I was. I’m co-writing a novella with my friend and collaborator Zac Farley and doing early think/note work on a new theater piece I’ll be writing for Gisele Vienne. Golnoosh, If you read this, John Newton said something to you and asked you a question in yesterday’s comments if you didn’t see it. Happy day. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. They are lovely. Or I think so. Art galleries were the only up to date cultural input there was in Paris these days, so losing them is a very tenable deprivation. Obviously, I second your urge to hit SFMoMA et al ASAP just in case. The plan is that the ‘Jerk’ film will play festivals. It’ll get released here, but I doubt elsewhere since it’s a glorified filmed play, and Gisele decided to shoot it in the French version so Jonathan would give the most nuanced performance. But maybe it’ll stream in the US or something? ** Right. I nerded out and decided to do one of my thematic posts about the brain, and you see what resulted. See you tomorrow.

8 Comments

  1. Misanthrope

    Dennis, This day reminds me of a huge poem I always had planned to write. Maybe I should get on it now, hahaha. Still have lots of other projects I want to do, though. I need to get on them.

    Yeah, that’s a fun little story, my “stroke” or whatever. I’ll be keeping that one in my back pocket for story times in the future.

    It’s raining here. Ugh.

    So…David and his friends decided to sit on my car the other night. I walk out yesterday and the hood’s all dented to fuck. I was able to get some of the big ones out, but it looks like total shit. Car isn’t even 3 years old (and I bought it new). He says that it’s not a big deal because it’s cosmetic. And oh, his $1,400 stimulus check that he got last Wednesday is gone. All drugs. He’s a mess. 24/7 high for a week. It’s actually quite disgusting, especially since most of it is pills.

    He said if I gave him a couple thousand dollars, he’d move. It’s tempting, but I know he’d be back and my mom would let him. Instead, I’m just going to look into getting out of here myself if it reaches a tipping point.

    Frankly, I think he’s trying to provoke me into a fight. He suddenly has this habit of coming up on me and screaming or meowing…yes, meowing really loudly…in my ear. Or snapping his fingers in my ears. Annoying as fuck. I don’t know what his game is.

  2. Ferdinand

    Brainy post today.. I cant help but think that the maze of my brain is a simple one when Im keeping a tab on the loops my thoughts partake in while doing excercise per se, maybe it just doesnt take much to obsess me.
    It was so cool to hear Wake Island mention my guestpost as they also happen to be doing a feauture on Baise Moi as Paul K mentioned to you. What a change to feel like my obsessions are shared by others. Cheers from a rainy spot in South Africa.

  3. David Ehrenstein

    Frank O’Hara often referred to Joe as “Lucille Leseur” Joe’s book on Frank is really great.

    Regarding today, don’t forget

    The Brain That Wouldn’t Die

    and

    The Brain From Planet Arous

  4. Bill

    Brains, ah. What’s not to like, ha? I can never resist brains on the menu.

    Danielle, I’m so envious you read “I Wished”.

    Just started Isabel Yap’s collection Never Have I Ever. Very enjoyable so far.

    Bill

  5. Sypha

    Of course, one of my favorite brains (in a pop cultural context) is Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles… I might be showing my age there though.

    The GRADIUS series of video games also famously features a recurring boss character known as ‘Golem’ that’s essentially a giant brain with an eyeball and claws:

    https://gradius.fandom.com/wiki/Golem

  6. Dominik

    Hi!

    Yeah, it’s pretty difficult to find anything about them from around that time – I mean, Jackie Beat and Sherry Vine. Which is a pity. If I had a time machine, I’d go back and watch your performance piece with Ishmael Houston-Jones right now. Ah.

    This sounds like a worthy way to celebrate, haha, thank you! Love looking like the most perfect, forever-pouting ball-jointed doll ever, Od.

  7. Steve Erickson

    I didn’t come up with the term “elevated horror,” and I’m rather cynical about it, although I like many films that fall under the umbrella. But too many recent horror films push subtext into text to make sure everyone understands they’re really about grief and trauma or some political theme, not young women being tortured and slaughtered in gory ways.

    Speaking of political themes, I saw Chris McKim’s new documentary on David Wojnarowicz last night. It’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen on that period of NYC culture. It feels fresh and vibrant and, most importantly, it does justice to Wojnarowicz’s anger.

    A friend of mine is having severe difficulty living on his own. I’m not sure how much I should talk about this in a public space, but his depression has turned into a delusional state that makes it impossible to communicate with him. I’m very worried.

  8. Jack Skelley

    Roasted Sweet Potato Tacos: Chimichurri cauliflower with sweet potato, avocado, corn pico de gallo and cilantro avocado drizzle on two corn tortillas.

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