The Einstein’s Brain Project is a group of scientists and artists working together to develop installations and environments exploring ideas about consciousness and the new constructions of the body. Recent work has used strategies taken from paranormal science and psychology to explore how interpretation in shared machine-human environments contributes to the construction of our worlds.

 This paper briefly introduces and contextualizes a new, developing work – ColourBlind - that explores the internal workings of a machine through an implementation of the Ganzfield Effect and Closed Eye Visualisation as they relate to ideas about hallucination in human and machine hybrids. The work explores ideas about machine vision and how hybrid interpretation gives rise to unbidden and unexpected colours, images and patterns in streams of unstructured data, and considers these as machine hallucinations.

This examination of the work ColourBlind, explores machine vision and computational analysis to examine a machine’s interiority – its phenomenal self-model, asking the question where is this model to be found? It does so in, in the context of earlier work that used ideas found in Electronic Voice and Video Phenomena to explore ideas about presence and absence, and pattern and randomness. These installations took the form of blinded cameras that sent visual and audio noise to a computer that analysed it for patterns that looked like human faces and sounded like human speech.

New work suggests it is possible to use machines and their interiorities in a phenomenologically driven investigation to discover hallucinatory tendencies that can create something akin to machine imagination. Increasingly our machines see and discriminate much as we do, and in turn change our perception of the world. This paper explores ideas about how we and machines see and experience the world, and raises questions about the capacity of both to discriminate. In the search for pattern in randomness, for colour where there is none, when faced with the horror vacui of sensory deprivation, the brain, and in this case the machine, we suggest continues its processing regardless, creating its own colours and forms as interpretative hallucinations, as part of a grid of a memoriously relational world.

Memristors are collapsing the boundaries between humans and machines and ushering in an age where humanistic discourse must grapple with cognitive entanglements. Perceptible only at the level of molecular electronics (nanoelectronics), the memristor was a theoretical concept until 2008. Two different researchers without knowledge of each other had postulated its probable existence respectively in the 1960s and the 1970s. Traditionally in electrical engineering there are resistors, inductors, and capacitors. The new circuit element, the memristor, was postulated to account for anomalies that had been experienced and described in the literature since the 1950s.

Conceptually, a memristor remembers how much and when current has been flowing. In 2008 when it was proved experimentally, engineering control was achieved months later in both digital and analogue formats. The more intriguing of the two formats is the analogue where a memristor is capable of an in-between state similar to certain brain states as opposed to the digital format where it’s either on or off. As some have described it, the memristor is a synapse on a chip making neural computing a reality. In other words, with post-human engineering we will have machines that can think like humans.

The memristor moves us past Jacques Derrida’s notion of undecidability (a cognitive entanglement) as largely theoretical to a world where we confront this reality on a daily basis.

SymbioticA was originally founded to provide a research space where artists and scientists could engage in debate, where artists could learn and apply techniques of the biological sciences to their work.  In particular, to allow artists and others from the humanities to deal with living material and to interact with biological scientists from a position of strength, equality and mutual understanding.  It was hoped this would lead to creative friction at the interface between the life sciences and the humanities.

Fish and Chips was a pioneering project of SymbioticA using “wet ware” (functioning neural tissue from fish or rats) to power “hard ware” (a robotic arm designed by Phil Gamblen) involving founder members of SymbioticA.  Programmers, scientists, artists, engineers and philosophers were involved or asked to comment on the work. This and the later developments pioneered by Guy Ben-Ary, Phil Gamblen, and the Steve Potter lab in Atlanta have been widely exhibited Internationally.  As a neuroscientist, and past Scientific Director of SymbioticA I am particularly interested in the role of nervous tissue in these works. The ethics of its use, how it is comprehended by the audience, the difficulties of presenting and curating living tissue, its possible functionality and the implications for the future of the techno-scientific body.

For example, in “Fish and Chips” first exhibited at Ars Electronica, the “brain” was the eye of a goldfish attached to the visual centre of its brain.  The very title was meant to present viewers with an ethical paradox, to eat fish while at the same time worrying about the ethics of its use in a “machine”, however this clash was prevented by the organisers.  Fish were culled in secret.  We debated how much information to provide and kept it to a minimum, however many viewers imbued the system with more creativity than it had.  We debated whether it needed to be “real” – would the audience know given the complexity of the system?  These issues are common to many artworks involving living material.  I will discuss the wider implications of artists working with living material using these art works as exemplars.