Spectacle of the Mind

I've been rather caught up in writing a catalogue essay and thinking about the Global Mind Project (Karen Casey & Harry Sokol) event called 'Spectacle of the Mind' which will be held on the stage and big screen at Federation Square, Melbourne on 10 December this year and include performances by Jill Orr, Stelarc and Domenico de Clario. http://www.karencasey.com.au/

I remembered years ago looking at Richard D. Altick's 'The Shows of London' (1978) a large tome filled with photographs of amazing scientific experiments and displays from seventeenth to nineteenth century England, so I tracked this book down at the RMIT library.

Since the 'Shows of London' brought together people from various stratum and the Global Mind Project will attract people to the already popular Federation Square in what can only be called 'spectacle' with an educational component, I thought the following quote from the book was ideal:

If shows brought the classes together, they were also the scene of the
perennial conflict between the claims of amusement and those of earnest
instruction (p.3)

What I found most interesting was that the 'Shows of London' were actually precursors to what we now understand as art exhibitions

A public which patronized exhibitions of 'natural' and 'artificial rarities' and
examples of 'mechanical ingenuity' now also had the means of indulging its
recently acquired taste for pictorial beauty...(p.99)

The Crystal Palace http://www.victorianstation.com/palace.html played a large part in contributing to the shows that were seen in London. Some of the exhibitions staged seemed somehow appropriate to what would be occurring in this event. There were dioramas and panoramas as well as an Eidophsikon. Phantasmagoria or 'Magic Lanterns' were all the rage. Faber's Euphoria (1846) was one of the exhibits as was Jacquet-Droz's Spectacle Mecanique (three automatons - a writer, an illustrator and a musician). And so it came to pass that the Global Mind Project also had three performers - an illustrator (Jill Orr), a writer (Stelarc) and a musician (Domenico de Clario). But not only that, these performance artists in their very coupling with an EEG headset and Karen's images enact, demonstrate or illustrate various aspect of the mind/body problem initiated by René Descartes in 1641 and continued in contemporary debates about the function of the human brain. I found most intriguing the fact that the word 'chemical' replaced the word 'philosophical' and it was indeed a time of magical connections, some instigated by charlatans, especially those who pretended that they could read minds.

Since the Global Mind Project demonstrates the mind/body problem, I was lead to Daniel C. Dennett's book 'Consciousness Explained' and then by chance came across William Gibson's 2007 novel 'Spook Country', which I began reading last week. Of course Gibson's 'spook' refers to a ghost or slang word for 'intelligent agent', but this also seemed relevant because it was Gilbert Ryle who had spoken about Descartes's 'spirit or mind' as a kind of 'ghost in the machine'; the machine being the human body.

Last week I mentioned to Karen that the photo that she and Damien had taken of Stelarc wearing the EEG headset (he was standing in front of a circular project light on which his shadow fell) reminded me of a performance by Laurie Anderson (America). Indeed in both Laurie Anderson's O Superman performance (1990) and in Dumb Type's (Japan) S/N performance (1992) the circular light device, plus shadow was a dominant motif. In all, biocentric and technocentric interpretations of the human body were highlighted.

A comment was made this evening on the Global Mind Project facebook site by Malcolm who was talking about his own experiments with EEG's to mimic the sounds made by Laurie Anderson in her performances. I suppose I am always taken by the fact that certain energies are produced by information and the coming together of minds, whether those minds are in close proximity or not. I believe that these are some of the issues at stake in this project, which is very exciting.

This morning (Wednesday) I was looking at the image of the Emotiv EPOC neural head-set in the BBC article about the future use of the headsets in gaming http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7254078.stm and was reminded of the film Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002), which shows the unique and co-dependent relationship between high tech problem solving and the deployment of precognitive (seers) to overcome future crime). Perhaps we are more highly charged energetically when we are being emotional and those brain-waves are more likely to be picked up by others.