Of Brains & Magnets
Ted Hiebert, Doug Jarvis and Jackson 2bears.
Latitude 53 Contemporary Visual Culture
Edmonton (AB) Canada, 15 April-14 May 2011
View the monograph essay by Scott Rogers
Of Brains & Magnets (Latitude 53, Edmonton, AB)
Of Brains & Magnets
a Noxious Sector project
Noxious Sector is a formalized forum for informal inquiry, a platform from which to explore the failures, intricacies and absurdities of artistic possibility. Building from stories of strange science and the paranormal, Noxious Sector projects are moments from which to wonder about the creative possibilities of speculative living. We heard a story that when you place high powered magnets next to the brain it is possible to artificially induce a trance-like -- even transcendental -- state of mind.
It made us wonder...
Doug Jarvis wondered what would happen if he put magnets on his head and watched disaster movies. Do magnets amplify sympathetic response? Does the disaster video cause the brain to disregard the impact of the magnets? Or, does the brainwave monitor somehow know what's going on -- and strangely lets the machines be sympathetic too?
Jackson 2bears wondered if he could think Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata into existence -- not because it wasn't already there but because there is something at stake in the question of whether we can remember it at all. Thinking into the brainwave sensors -- activated by magnets -- conjuring the virtual keyboard that plays his mind out loud.
Ted Hiebert wondered how many magnets you'd have to put together to get them to stick through a human head. A few of them together stick through a hand, so it makes sense that the magnetic field could be extended -- risking either a magnetic wipe for the mind or a moment of magnetically induced transcendence.