I’m a big fan of Greg Dunn’s gold leaf paintings of neurons and other natural structures, but I also love his scrolls. Scrolls similar to these are often hung in Japanese rooms for contemplation during traditional tea ceremonies. I’ve been lucky enough to participate in a couple of tea ceremonies and although I’m no expert, these scrolls seem to really capture some of the objectives of the ritual: appreciation of the harmony of nature and self cultivation. 

Images from Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century by Carl Schoonover

About the book:

Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century (Abrams, November 2010) follows the fascinating exploration of the brain through images. These beautiful black-and-white and vibrantly colored images, many resembling abstract art, are employed daily by scientists around the world, but most have never before been seen by the general public. From medieval sketches and 19th-century drawings by the founder of modern neuroscience to images produced using state-of-the-art techniques, readers are invited to witness the fantastic networks in the brain.

Each chapter in Portraits of the Mind addresses a different set of techniques for studying the brain, and each is introduced with an essay by a leading scientist in that field of study. Extended captions provide detailed explanations of each image as well as the major insights gained by scientists over the course of the past twenty years. The result is a peek at the mind’s innermost workings, helping readers to understand, and offering clues about what may lie ahead.

Hardcoded Memory by Troika

Memory is closely linked to forgetting. Before the digital era, forgetting was easy, for better or worse, not only is it biologically in-built to forget, the analog world around us cannot guarantee that recorded memories will last forever. Photographs fade, film footage can be lost and media out-dated, thus remembering was the exception and forgetting the default. Now in an age of endless digital image reproduction there is no longer a need to remember. We externalise our memories by handing them over to the digital realm enabled through digitization; inexpensive storage software, ease of retrieval and global access, blurring lines of ownership and making virtual forgetting close to impossible.

In the installation, Low-resolution portraits are projected onto the gallery wall, generated by a hardcoded mechanical structure, which in the nature of its construction limits the selection of available images.

‘Hardcoded memory’ is a reflection on the moment, and on time itself, standing as a metaphor for the human search for meaning and continuity, while celebrating forgetting in the digital age.

Neuroanatomical atlas illustration plates from the 1786 Traité d’Anatomie et de Physiologie by Félix Vicq D’Azyr

What Have You Got In Your Head? by Sara Asnaghi. Mmm…brains

Work by Jan Fabre from his exhibition Chimères 

(h/t Alec Shao)

Plates from the X-ray Atlas of the Skull. 1918

Brain art by Elizabeth Jameson

Jameson on her work:

I work at the convergence of science and art in the study of the human brain. I create portraits of myself and others through the use of magnetic resonance images (MRIs) and the latest advances in neuroimaging technology. With the assistance of leaders in the field of neurology and neuroscience, my images provide new insights into the brain and, at the same time, make medical imaging and its representative humanity more accessible to both medical professionals and others who view these revealing pictures.

My fascination with medical imaging and brain scans has a personal basis. Diagnosed with the disease of multiple sclerosis, I found myself confronting stark images of my brain that seemed equally frightening and mesmerizing. In tackling this contradiction, I felt a strong urge to reinterpret these images — to use them to explore the amazing biological structure of the brain. My current artwork saturates these cold, two-dimensional computerized pixels with rich colors that transform scientific images into portraits of individuals with all the frailties, humor, and idiosyncrasies that make us human.

Anne Lindberg uses thousands of strings to play with our perception in her large scale installations.

Lindberg on her work:

Neurologists have determined that the old brain holds the seat of our most primal understandings of the world. Goodwill, security, fear, anxiety, self-protection, gravity, sexuality, and compulsive behaviors generate from this lower cerebral core.

My sculpture and drawings inhabit a non-verbal place resonant with such primal human conditions. Systemic and non-representational, these works are subtle, rhythmic, abstract, and immersive. I find beauty and disturbance through shifts in tool, layering and material to create passages of tone, density, speed, path and frequency within a system. In recent room-sized installations, I discovered an optical and spatial phenomenon that excites me as the work spans the outer reaches of our peripheral vision. The work references physiological systems – such as heartbeat, respiration, neural paths, equilibrium - and psychological states.

Unfortunately, this Yahoo News slideshow is as close as I’m going to get to the Brains exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London, England. 

About the exhibit:

The exhibit makes up part of the Wellcome Collection’s major new exhibition, ‘Brains’ which includes slices of Einstein’s brain, 3000 year old trepanned skulls, ancient Egyptian mummified brains and brains in jars, and opens to the public from March 29 June 17, 2012. 

Reassembling the Self 1 and 2 by Susan Aldworth are currently on display at the GV Art gallery’s newest group exhibition Polymath. The show, like the gallery, features artists that  ”create synergies and connect disparate ideas and different schools of thoughts”.

About her work:

Susan Aldworth’s Reassembling the Self 1 and 2 are lithographs from a new series of work, born from her residency at the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University, and based on her collaborations with schizophrenia patients and the scientists researching it. The works consist of a collage of medical images – drawings, diagrams, scans – of human body parts, including organs, skeletons, tissue, crania – distributed disjointedly over the picture surface. It gives a sense of the discombobulation produced by this most anguishing of mental illnesses. The cranium visible in lithograph 1 is divided up diagrammatically and numbered, according to the phrenological ‘discipline’ of attributing certain regions of the brain to specific human characteristics. It is a suggestive illustration, identifying how one (now completed discredited) branch of medicine produced a specific series of narratives entangling quack scientific evidence and human identity. In its time, the pioneers and followers of phrenology believed that their knowledge could neatly classify the physical brain and thus explain the self. If any disease disproves this simplistic categorisation, it is schizophrenia, about which so many public misconceptions (and much stigma) still exists.

This beautiful work came from the brain of artist Katherine Dowson in more ways than one:

I had an MRI scan as part of the research into Dyslexia and all the resulting work ‘My Soul’ and ‘Brain Bricks’ are of my life size brain. ‘Memory of a Brain Malformation’ is a Venus Ulterior Malformation that was successfully lasered out of my cousins brain.

The BrainCar by Olaf Mooji

From WHOA:

The BrainCar was created by Rotterdam artist, Olaf Mooji, and is a mobile sculpture that features a brain-like extrusion on the back of a modified used car. During the day, the vehicle drives around (operated by a human driver, obviously) and captures and stores images and video from its travels. During the night, the footage is remixed and projected from within the brain sculpture and visible to passersby on the outside. Mooji’s body of work involves the alteration of motor vehicles in pieces that express the nearly psychological connection between drivers and their cars. In the case of the BrainCar, Mooji wondered what it would be like if “…the car itself could experience with a kind of consciousness its own passage through spacetime.”

Read more…

Artist Noah Scalin makes skulls out of the darndest things. Click on the images to find out what each skull is made of.

This shiny and bright neuron ornament is available in the Anatomology Etsy store