As seen in a previous post, it is possible to use science or engineering as the starting points to create artworks that are completely based on fantasy. Yet, it is also possible to create pieces that are completely based on science and that look like fascinating works of art. "Self Reflected" (2019-2022) by Dr. Greg Dunn in collaboration with Dr. Brian Edwards is the perfect example.
Inspired by neuroscience and engineering, this monumental work (a version of it was recently auctioned at Sotheby's) consists in a 23k handmade gilded microetching in 25 panels mounted together in a frame and completed by "The Crescent", a lighting structure containing 1,596 high-powered LEDs, illuminating the microetching with up to 15 thousand lumens of light.
Lighting programs activate highly dynamic and colorful displays that mirror electrical activity in the brain, using different combinations of shades such as white, magenta, and violet or yellow, green, blue and violet.
The dynamic microetching is an 8-by-12 foot representation of a single brain slice depicting neural activity in the human brain. So that when you stare at it, you are actually staring at your brain actively perceiving itself, that's why this work is a self-portrait and a hyperdetailed animated representation of human consciousness.
Artist and neuroscientist Dr. Greg Dunn and artist and applied physicist Dr. Brian Edwards created "Self Reflected" a few years ago to explain the functioning of the most marvelous machine in the universe, the human brain. The piece was also included in 2016 in an exhibition at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
To create this piece, Dunn and Edwards did extensive researches about each region of the brain, its neuron types, sizes, what other neurons and regions they are connected to, firing patterns, neurotransmitter types and so on.
They settled on depicting an oblique sagittal slice of the human brain as this view provides a great deal of variety in structures, interesting circuitry, and avoids the ventricles that would simply have appeared as holes in the brain in this view.
The technique chosen is fascinating as well: the final work is the combination of hand drawing, algorithmically simulated neural circuitry, adapted neuroscientific data, photolithography, gilding, and strategic lighting, but this is not a scan of a brain.
"Self Reflected" is indeed made with a technique called reflective microetching that allows to give a piece a greatly enhanced visual experience. This term indicates handmade lithographs that manipulate light on a microscopic scale to control the reflectivity of metallic surfaces in precise ways. Indeed, microetchings have no colour, but they appear as gilded surfaces and they take the colour of any light source that illuminates it. For example, they can reflect one colour or an infinitely flexible variation of colours, complex ones included.
These techniques were invented by Dr. Greg Dunn and his colleague Dr. Brian Edwards to change the way the viewer experiences a painting, and also emphasize the concept that every human perceives the world differently from another.
The microscopic etches of the microetchings capture light arriving from different angles, this means that they reflect a different image of the overall piece to every viewer depending on their position. As a consequence the viewer (and even the viewer's two eyes) each have a unique visual experience.
While staring at the artwork scientists and doctors will easily spot in it the regions of the brain, from the visual cortex to the frontal gyrus, the thalamus and basal ganglia, the olfactory bulb and the motor and parietal cortex, but people who are not experts will still be able to enjoy the artwork with its regions that conjure up microscopic pictures of leaves and plants or optic fiber textiles.
"Self Reflected" is a visually bright work of elegance and beauty that pulsates with mesmerizing lights and wavelike electrical activity and its merit stands in the fact that it provides us with an immediate picture of the human brain.
The artwork makes it easier to grab the vastness and beautiful organization of the brain and lets us understand the complexity behind it not with difficult scientific explanations, but with immediate and delicately balanced neural choreographies designed to reflect what is occurring in our own minds as we observe this piece.
This is the art of neuroscience or neuroscience as art and you can bet that, at some point, some fashion designer will move from this piece for a collection or a runway show. Actually, maybe Dunn and Edwards should do a new piece showing the activity of the brain when we see something - like a garment or an accessory - that we deeply desire. Guess that would be a hit with the fashion crowd.
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