Performaitve sculpture

City: Mexico City.
Year: 2024.
Technique: Neurons culture, electroencephalography sensor, authoring electronics, sound, performer.
Measures: Variable.

 

Through technology, an expanded nervous system is created that allows to informationally connect two brains. This is a performative sculpture that is articulated in time by means of a robotic control chip, but this chip is not made of silicon or semiconductor materials, but of living biological neurons. This chip controls an electrical muscle stimulation system that dictates the movement of the performer. In other words, electroshocks move a human body involuntarily, and that algorithmic choreography is programmed into a circuit of biological neural networks.

The electrical signal of this neuron culture is amplified through the cell physiology technique known as patch clamp. Once amplified and filtered, it is digitized to be analyzed through various artificial intelligence algorithms, these algorithms create the stimulation sequences to suggest movements to the performer.

On the other hand, the performer is connected to a neural wave sensor (electroencephalography EEG) and goes through the same process: amplification and filtering, digitization and analysis. The patterns that result from this process send electrical stimuli to the neuron culture so that it changes its signal generation patterns and can change the performer’s stimulation patterns, thus creating an informational biofeedback system, an augmented nervous system.

This work is a technochamanic rite of passage where different paradigms of neural networks interfere in the same system forming an informational trinity: the human brain with an EEG (natural neural networks), an electronic computing system with algorithms (artificial neural networks) and a biological substrate computing system composed of living biological neurons (natural neural networks). This passage will lead the interpreter to an inter-species, but also inter-material informational communion.

On the other hand, it is important to say that it is also an offering to all non-human living beings who have been sacrificed in the name of science, simulating a scientific experiment of electrophysiology, it is now the human being who is exposed to electrocutions by the design of another being.