Imagining Thought in Digital Space
Kellyann Geurts, Mark Guglielmetti
Monash University
Melbourne, Australia
kgeu1@student.monash.edu
mark.guglielmetti@monash.edu
Abstract
Scientists and artists have attempted to capture thought in the
form of images for over a century. In the early twentieth century
photographic plates and nitrate film were used by scientists, artists and “spiritualists” to record thoughts or mental energy, including thoughts, feelings and dreams, through the process of
making physical contact with fingers or foreheads on light sensitive plates. With the discovery of X-ray photography around the
same time, the photographic image played a role in validating
claims about the possibility of revealing the invisible. These
claims were further extended with the invention of electroencephalography (EEG) in 1924. EEG allowed for new possibilities in
the study of neuronal activities and for identifying new patterns of
thinking. The formation of these image-making practices, in both
art and science, laid the foundations for how we literally and figuratively re-imagine and express images of thought in the 21st
century.
In this short paper we provide an account of “thoughtography”
and how it developed through the twentieth century as a cultural
artefact. [1] This account provides a framework to consider the
recent trend to crowdfund and mass-produce non-invasive mindmachine interfaces for consumers, ready and willing to measure
and directly interface cognitive and emotional relationships with
and to our work environments and domestic social lives.
Keywords
Thought form, mind-machine interface, thought-photography,
thoughtography, science fiction, neuroimaging, neuroheadset,
digital thinking
Introduction
Consumer mass technoculture, fictive figuration of dreams as
accessible and objectifiable is merely one part of the background to the unending demand for externalization of one's
life into pre-made digital formats. [2]
In the ever-expanding array of digital tools and consumer
products designed and created to organise and coordinate
our contemporary lives, comes a device that captures and
records our raw EEG data, the mind-machine interface
(MMI). Of relevance to this paper is the unique situation
that wireless MMI headsets can now be purchased and
used in the workplace or in our domestic social lives. Developed for interactive neurogaming, these products have
been on the market for about a decade and have already
been opened up for domestic use. The prices for currently
available products start at around $300 (U.S. dollars). The
latest gadget soon to be released onto the consumer market
is the Emotiv Insight, crowdfunded by Kickstarter campaign and raising $1.6 million for its development.
The possibilities for the “do-it-yourself” mind recordings makes it possible to capture and record a persons neuronal responses to everyday stimulus regardless of the activity, from the mundane though to the exhilarating, and
irrespective to the environment we are in, from monitoring
“performance and emotional metrics” at the workplace or
sports institute to the massively multiplayer online game
(MMO). [3]
Whilst these devices have recently been developed for a
consumer market the devices are not novel per se, they
have been instrumental in scientific and medical research
to capture patterns of “thought” since 1924. However there
is a pre-history to the institutionalization of capturing
thought. Arresting and materializing “thought” into pictorial representation has refracted in the scientific imagination vis-à-vis culture and art-making since early photography.
Thought recording
This research sketches out the scientific and artistic pursuits that attempted to capture thought and the residue of
thought in the form of images from the mid 19th century to
the contemporary landscape. The discoveries and inventions of photographic tools and image making practice that
reshaped visual perception by capturing fleeting images of
thoughts and expressions was a pursuit shared by converging discourses in medicine, science, art and culture. From
the complex atmosphere of French politics circa 1839 [4]
through Darwin’s photographic collection of human and
animal emotion published in The Expression of Emotion in
Man and Animals [5], then neurologist Jean Martin Charcot's studies on psychiatric patients at the Salpêtrière hospital Paris from 1878 [6], to the discovery of X-rays [7] photography played a role in validating claims about what
the naked eye could not see. The technological developments in and cultural formations of the recording devices
during this time enabled us to uncover what was previously
hidden and also allow us to reformulate beliefs about the
world.
In a world willing to embrace the objective nature of
photography, scientific and specific forms of art photography flourished. [8, 9] Experiments conducted with the
camera were controlled and methodologies to validate experiments were repeated.
Some of the earliest known thought photographs were
created by French psychiatrist Dr Hippolyte Baraduc
(1850-1909), in his experiments to capture subtle forms of
“mental activity” on light-sensitive materials (figure 1). He
pursued a belief that the substance of thoughts could materialize on photographic plates. In a speech in 1896 Baraduc
stated:
experiences of the world as it materializes for them in The
Intention to Know:
This form indicates the determination to solve some problem
the intention to know and to understand. Sometimes a theosophical lecturer sees many of these yellow serpentine forms
projecting towards him from his audience, and welcomes
them as a token that his hearers are following his arguments
intelligently, and have an earnest desire to understand and to
know more. A form of this kind frequently accompanies a
question, and if, as is sometimes unfortunately the case, the
question is put less with the genuine desire for knowledge
than for the purpose of exhibiting the acumen of the questioner, the form is strongly tinged with the deep orange that
indicates conceit. [13]
If thought is simply fixed in an image, this image of light the
luminous clothing of our ideas, will have a sufficiently powerful photochemical action to imprint the gelatinous film, either directly or mediated through glass, and in a manner invisible to the human eye; these are what I have called psychicons, luminous, living images of thought. [10]
Figure 1 Hippolyte Baraduc Photographs His Wife Nadine, 20
Minutes, 1907
The thought image has also been documented and visualized in art – by means of line, shape, colour and form.
This is clearly illustrated in Annie Besant and Charles
Webster Leadbeater’s book titled Thought-Forms. [11]
Both prominent members of the Theosophical Society,
Besant and Leadbeater’s experimentation and research
resulted in modelling various “thought forms”. According
to the artists, there were three categories of thought forms:
those which capture the image of the thinker; those which
capture the image of some material object and those which
capture a form entirely on its own, expressing its inherent
qualities in the matter which it draws around it. [12] Unlike
the process of waiting for thought to materialize on photographic plates, thought forms materialized clearly to the
artist. These forms were isomorphic to a specific emotion,
problem or concept, one that could be hand drawn and illustrated. For example the thought form The Intention to
Know (figure 2) is located in the “image of the thinker”
category. It should be no surprise that these thought images
were tainted by the artists’ personal perceptions of the
world. This is clearly expressed in how they describe their
Figure 2 Besant & Leadbeater, The Intention to Know (no.19),
1901
By no account was the visualisation of thought forms the
sole domain of Besant and Leadbeater. Rudolf Steiner was
appointed to the German/Austrian division of the Theosophical Society in 1904. The similarities between the
work of Steiner and Besant & Leadbeater are evidenced
through a selection of Steiner's blackboard drawings. [14]
This is most apparent when comparing Besant’s Helpful
Thought (figure 3) and Steiner's blackboard drawing: What
is Thinking? (figure 4) as they both directly reference the
same visual motif. The drawings use similar line, shape,
colour and form. There is little evidence of chance in the
images as they endeavour to capture the world and articulate the spirit of the times in symbolic gestures. Steiner
described these works as “thought-pictures” with the purpose of extending thought and capturing something fleeting through form and function.
Besant and Leadbeater attempted to gain scientific
acknowledgement for the invisible forms and otherworldly
experiences they captured in their illustrations. They did so
by referencing Dr Baraduc’s photographic images of mental activity in the introduction to Thought-Forms describ-
ing Baraduc as the most successful practitioner to have
recorded more “scientifically legitimate” and subtle forms
of mental activity, as opposed to the work of clairvoyants
and spirit photographers of the time. [15]
Figure 3 Besant & Leadbeater, Helpful Thoughts (no.54), 1901
Figure 4 Rudolf Steiner, Blackboard Drawings, What is Thinking?, 1923
Not content with distancing themselves to charlatans
like spirit photographers, Besant and Leadbeater went further than Baraduc’s research. For Baraduc, his recording
instruments captured the vibrations of the grey matter in
the brain as a result of a thought: not the thought itself but
rather the effects it produced. For Besant and Leadbeater
they could see the details of the thought and not the effects
of it. It was in fact the aim of their little book to show
thoughts as things.
Mind-machine interfaces
The thought images created by the artists and scientists
discussed above were collected then catalogued as a way
of recording and storing data from multiple trials of a variety of experiments. The processes created by these scientists and artists informed the development of electroencephalography (EEG) in 1924. It is at this point in the
twentieth century that EEG technologies and experimental
imaging procedures are institutionalized for use as scientific and medical diagnostic tools. It is not until the late
1970s early 1980s that the metaphorical and material relays
of art, culture and science refract through each other again
to explore thought imaging and capture thoughts forms.
The mind-machine or brain-computer interface technology regained popular traction in the cultural and artistic
imagination in the mid-late twentieth century through films
such as La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), Brainstorm (Douglas Trumbull, 1983), and Until the End of the World (Wim
Wenders, 1991). [16,17,18] In these films mind-machine
interfaces capture and record human thoughts, memories
and dreams. These ephemeral imaginings are stored then
retrieved for later examination.
The refractive relationships between art, culture and
science are best exemplified in the film Until the End of
the World. This film sets out to create a machine that records images blind people can see. The portable camera-like
contraption is designed to capture the brain activity of the
user experiencing the visual world and the recordings reconstructed in the blind persons visual cortex. The device
is soon repurposed to record the user's dreams and the subjects soon become obsessed with their own lost and imagined worlds.
What we witness in contemporary cultural imaginings is
replayed in clinical labs. In 2011, UCLA neuroscientists
used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and
EEG to record the brainwave patterns of people watching
video. The scientists then convert the images from the recorded data into a video format. [19] A similar experiment
conducted by researchers at the Department Neuroinformatics, Japan, created a “dream decoding video”. [20]
Both these experiments were similar to those imagined in
Until the End of the World where researchers record the
patterns of a patient’s synapse activity whilst the patient
watches a moving image sequence. The data generated is
recompiled then “played back” to reconstruct the images
that were watched.
Conclusion: Digital thinking
Recently Mark Amerika reworked humanities obsession
with the recording of identity recasting it however from the
point of view of the machine in MetaTourism: Interior
Landscapes and Digital Thoughtography (2001). This
work explores “a voice in the machine that begins to speak
to itself”. The Digital Thoughtographer is a central figure/voice in the work that roams the interior landscape.
The process of thoughtography here represents the inner
voice, observing, reflecting and recording. The thoughtographer, has an inner character that, by its very name, acts to
capture the thoughts of the machine through the machine.
Amerika’s isolated character resonates with developments not only in “thoughtography” but in artificial intelligence and artificial life. Paul Virilio’s observation on the
perceptron is a cautionary but salient one:
Once we are definitively removed from the realm of direct or
indirect observation of synthetic images created by the machine for the machine, instrumental virtual images will be for
us the equivalent of what a foreigner’s mental pictures already represent: an enigma. [21]
Virilio’s bleak assessment too is an echo of Étienne-Jules
Marey’s prescient account of technologies for automatic
inscription and self-recording machines:
These machines are not only destined to replace the observer,
in which case they perform their role with overwhelming supremacy, but they also have their own domain where nothing
can replace them. When the eye ceases seeing, the ear hearing
and the sense of touch feeling, or when our senses give us deceptive appearances, these machines are like new senses of
astounding precision. [22]
It should come as no surprise that mind-machine interface’s such as the Emotiv Insight or Emotiv EPOC resonate
in our cultural imagination, the formation of this imagination has figured in and echoed though science for over onehundred years. What is new is the wide distribution of these technologies into the consumer market so that we may
benchmark our cognitive and emotional performances.
What remains uncertain is how we might use these performance measurements to eventually compete with artificial
intelligent and artificial creative systems that too generate
and record their own thoughts and images through the automated “liquid space of informational capitalism”. [23]
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Authors Biographies
Kellyann Geurts is a PhD candidate at Monash University and
employed at RMIT University, Australia. Through digital imaging, she explores ways to represent thought patterns and mental
spaces into two and three-dimensional forms. The project was
recently presented at the Digital Subject III: Temporalities symposium, University of Paris VIII. Kellyann's Master of Arts degree project: A Theory of Error was presented at Goldsmiths College London and University of Amsterdam. Melbourne exhibitions include Dianne Tanzer Gallery; RMIT Gallery and National
Neurosciences Facility, Melbourne University.
Mark Guglielmetti has a PhD in Visual Art for examining artificial life as a contemporary artifact in image making and not
through the domain of computer science. The culmination of this
research built on the artists’ studio-led research practice into the
digitally mediated reconfiguring human in a Master of Arts degree exploring visual perception, completed in 2004. Guglielmetti
has been widely published including in Leonardo, Computers in
Entertainment (ACM), and the Philosophy of Photography, and
has presented at numerous conferences in Europe, the US and
Australia. Guglielmetti’s work has been exhibited nationally and
internationally including ISEA2011 Istanbul, Ars Electronica
2004, Biennial of Electronic Arts Perth (BEAP) 2004, the Melbourne International Film Festival 2001, and showcased at the
Architectural Biennial in Beijing 2004 and in “Australian Screen
Culture”, at the Barbican in London 2004 and Centre Pompidou
in 2003.