As I look at the artist’s brain, slowly pulsating, they begin to describe it to me. “Wrinkly foreskin” they say at one point. “A Picasso”. Minutes pass, and the MRI of the brain recedes into a smaller and smaller image.
At the point of implosion, where it becomes less an object and more a vaporous cloud, the artist’s whispery voiceover characterises the moment of sublimation as “a rock into the wind / big bang.” This description is imaginatively precise but removed from its context it becomes less a description than a kind of parable.
Augmented Body, Altered Mind is a collaborative and interactive exhibition that weaves a brain-computer interface with an audio-visual environment. Created by environmental artist AlanJames Burns and curated by Marek Wolynski, the exhibition celebrates the different cognitive abilities that are necessary for creative problem solving, and in turn, explores the potential to collectively reshape the world towards a more diverse, inclusive and sustainable future.
In the first room, displayed on a life-size, freestanding vertical screen is Artists Brain, a three-minute video animation of the artist describing what they see in a scan of their brain. The brain is positioned at eye-level and it slowly morphs in a pulsating, sentient manner as the scan rotates.
Augmented Body, Altered Mind from AlanJames Burns on Vimeo.
Burns has been tinkering with and enhancing the monologue for the best part of a decade and this has resulted in a richly expressed, dyslexic interpretation of a physical, complex organ. As the monologue stumbles through a strange and vivid world of associative imagery, the work acts as a gentle introduction to Burn’s practice and social commentary prior to the main work in the show: the titular Augmented Body, Altered Mind.
In the show, Augmented Body, Altered Mind is described as an immersive ‘projected environment and multi-channel soundscape, where visitors are invited to co-create the artwork in real time by wearing a brain-sensing headset that detects electric signals generated by different brain waves.’ This is the promising centrepiece and there is a minor queue to enter.
The dark room hosts a large-scale projection spread across two large screens that are almost perpendicular to each other. A visitor is sitting opposite the screen wearing headphones and a brain-sensing headset that is attached to her forehead. Next to her is a small monitor where coloured lines overlap in a jagged medical vernacular.
Emma, the exhibition host, explains that the four lines are showing brain activity, which is co-creating the visuals in real time. The visuals themselves are of natural-like gradients: an otherworldly landscape of ochre-like rubble is skimmed across before it is swept into snowy craters in an image that is vaguely allusive of the surface of the Moon.
There is also, she explains, an accompanying soundscape that is a complex artwork in its own terms. Multi-channel speakers hidden within the space immerse visitors with sounds reminiscent of gusting winds, cracking ice and volcanic eruptions. Fed through headphones is a layered dialogue that references the societal, economic and climate issues that we face nowadays.
The script, in which the characters are neurodiverse, veers from the odd and humorous – “It’s Whitney Shears here, pass it on / Ooh I’ll get my S&M gear!” to the serious “The point is that dyslexic brains are hypersensitive to contextual shifts and cues”, and enables us to think about some of the ideas surrounding neurodiversity as we watch the projection.
The complex rhetoric around neurodiversity feeds into the topic of eco-ableism. It has varying definitions and has been interpreted as “a failure by non-disabled environmental activists to recognize that many of the climate actions that they’re promoting make life difficult for disabled people.”
Here, however, Burns pushes this idea to include the direct consequences of climate change on disabled people who are disproportionately affected from “the lack of accessible information and vulnerabilities in extreme weather events.”
This idea has been pitifully unexplored in current climate debates, but Burns shows both sides of the coin here: yes, neuro-divergent voices are key in supporting the development of creative solutions to the climate crisis, but they are also the ones who stand to suffer most in a crisis.
Finally, I enter the last space – ‘reflection room’ where viewers can reflect and take in the complex information that the exhibition offers. In a room that is reminiscent of a therapist’s office, there is a sofa and chairs along with a multitude of plants and relaxing scents. Books and articles about aspects of cognition adorn a table, and viewers are encouraged to reflect on their experience within the conceptual framework of the show.
On the walls are quotes that position the show within a sociological discourse, accompanied by a looped video showing an early iteration of Augmented Body, Altered Mind. There are also prints which visualise Burns’s own brain activity, with dialogue from the soundscape. It offers a genuine conclusion and provides a bridge between the works. It is as if the artist said, ‘this was about you, it was also about me: it is about all of us.’
Sitting on the sofa, I came back to the idea of “a rock into the wind / big bang.” It seemed to me that Burns’s work highlights and encapsulates the neglected density of ideas that come from those we ignore and forget, and which signify ‘the rock in the wind’. The consequences are potentially a ‘big-bang’, an event that signifies less a renewal than a disaster with unspecified consequences.
AlanJames Burns is an environmental and audiovisual artist. Since 2016, he has developed critically acclaimed multi-sensorial installations in caves of Ireland and Britain, which explored the concept of aural consciousness and mental health. The focal point of his practice remains the human mind, specifically the non-linear ever-fleeing system of divergent thoughts it creates, however his works recently have begun to engage with the problem of climate change.
By AlanJames Burns
Curated by Marek Wolynski
7-16 October 2022
The Earth Vision, 13 Soho Square, London
On international tour in 2023
