The work MindDraw is a real-time interactive viewer participation work that enables people to create beautiful brain based images. By accessing their mental states of relaxation, meditation, focus or just by thinking, the participants drive the shape and speed of the imagery.
This universal and personal work gives the participant an intimate view of the workings of their own mind through drawing. By using the EEG data sensor the brain waves are converted into stunning constantly fluxing imagery.
To engage the work, the participant with the help of an assistant sits near the projection site and simply dons the brainwave sensor headset. With the headset in place, the sensor dynamically captures the brainwaves in action and converts their current internal alpha, beta, gamma or theta state into drawings. The user is then able to immediately see their brain in action.
MindDraw enables us to look into the mind and see our internal world reflected in dynamic externalized patterns. For those who have experienced it, they have seen their brain’s real-time activity, possibly for the first time. This noninvasive work enables the participant to see their brainwaves in operation, but translated into an aesthetic engine. And, although these frequencies are defined by the brain wave functions like attention, awareness, relaxation, sleep, and cognition, MindDraw demonstrates how all of these elements emerge and interact in an intricate dance, with one particular behavior emerging as a result of the interactions of all the others working together to process our internal world.
This internal representation of the world is itself a translation, governed by the laws of psychophysics. Psychophysics is the translation of external physical world into the internal psychological arena, converting physics into perceptual representation by the specialized biology and chemical action of our senses. MindDraw allows a reversal of this process by translating bioelectric representations emerging form the activity of the brain while it forms our personal psychological reality into a community-accessible aesthetic representation of the same.
In translating and showing the brain’s activity with MindDraw we are extracting one of nature’s most complex patterns – the epiphenomenon of mind; more than just a simple light and sound summation of brainwave frequencies, MindDraw interprets the complex patterning of consciousness in action, stepping beyond the Aristotelian concept of art as mimicry. MindDraw becomes an integrated extension of a natural process that takes the personal and projects it into the social realm, and setting the stage for future works that may let us see and participate in our and others’ thoughts, dreams, fantasies and nightmares?
“Art isn’t about understanding it is about experience.” Jerry Saltz, Frieze magazine #94, October 2005.
MindDraw Exhibits
2017 Creative Consciousness, Pennsylvania College of Art & Design, Lancaster, PA (solo)
2017 MindDraw, 3rd Annual Next Gen Tech & Innovation Conference, performance with Nona Hendryx and Sisters MaTr
2017 MindDraw, Brain Week, Providence, RI
2016 Memory Networks, Warren Albert Medical School, Providence, RI (solo)
2016 EmBodied, SciArt Center, New York, NY; Sideshow, Brooklyn, NY
2016 Physical Memory, AC Institute, NY, NY (solo)
2016 Brain Week, Brown University & Care Alliance
2016 Brown Science Alumni Reunion
Interviews/Reviews
2016 Art the Science, Interview, https://artthescience.com/
2016 Interalia, Memory Networks issue, interaliamag.org/audiovisual/china-blue/
2016 SciArt Magazine, Sciartmagazine.com/blog/interview-china-blue-on-her-work-featured-in-sciarts-embodied-exhibit, Interview
Publications
2016 NPNI Brochure, Rhode Island Hospital, Providence, RI
2016 Ableton Projects, https://cycling74.com/project/minddraw/#.WGwftVMrJtQ
Talks
2016 Awareness, Y-House, Brooklyn, NY
2016 MindDraw & Imagining Blue, NY Lazer a Leonardo/ISAST LEAF initiative (Leonardo Education and Art Forum) an MIT affiliate
2016 Brain Work, Adobe, Creative Tech Week, New York, NY
2016 MindDraw with Sisters MaTr at 3rd Annual Next Gen Tech & Innovation Conference, MIST Harlem, Harlem, NY
2016 SpectoTemporal Aesthetic: Time, Space and Place, University of Applied Science and the Arts, Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures, Basel, Switzerland