GeistDenkenheit
Esthner Klein Gallery
2017
The voyage of a brain creating a mind; the process of the mind
contemplating the brain.
An Installation by Tyler Kline
What are the shape and form of our thoughts? What is the aesthetic of our
minds landscape? How is technology structuring the reach of our mind? In the past
decade cognitive mapping and cranial scanning have provided a revolution of visual
date regarding the structure of the most complex organ in the universe, the human
brain. The understanding of the mind still remains as quicksilver or vapor; the
brain is intrigal in creating the mind, but the mind transcends our body, it soars
beyond our physical reach and mingles with memories both past and a yet to be
solidly decremented future.
In an experiment to use this recent cognitive data as a point of departure I
created a fictional character, Bravo Starkweather, as a speculative vessel.
Starkweather serves as a psychological segregate, one where the questions of
different aspect of his/her journey from birth to corporeal awareness to post-
humanism to transgalactic voyaging can be worked out through the creation of
objects in media as disparate as ink blots, bronze and leaded glass casting, 3d
printing, laser cut acrylic, and digital video.
Part of this project is a meditation on the non-binary nature of biological
intelligence vs the binary algorithm controlled nature of Artificial Intelligence.
Through the futurist text of Ray Kurtzweil and Jaron Lanier, one an optimist
cheerleader of silicon ascendancy and the other a critic, I have created objects
formed by the frission between these two camps. It is my stance that A.I. will never
think like a biological human brain; it will never overtake us that way. What is
happening, and what the real singularity entails, is that humans are beginning to
think like their binary devices, we are culturally and psychologically being colonized
by artificial intelligence. At some point this will become native. It is already
legislated, our current police state designed for a post-human society.
The singularity will be a complete binary colonization of the native biological
mind. Yet, older structures of the brain will continue to exist, what does this look
like in the minds eye. Will technology eventually have to replace the medulla,
cerebellum and amygdala to make way for neural enhancement of the outer
cortexes. What will be lost in this transition, and what does it look like. This
installation is created out of a need to document our changing internal model and
capture the feeling of this stage of crux we are all witness to, as technology outpaces
our philosophy of what it means to be human in the early 21 st century.