When neuroscientists say they “listen” to the brain, they’re often using electrodes to monitor some of the brain’s billions of neurons, eavesdropping on a mere sliver of the rowdy conversation from which consciousness emerges.
But visitors to the Museum of Science can listen in on the whole brain of conceptual artist and musician Beatie Wolfe, whose sonic self-portrait, “imPRINTING,” will make its US debut at the MoS on Jan. 30.
Forgoing electrodes, Wolfe’s installation uses old-school telephones connected to a retro-futuristic “thinking cap,” a sort of next-gen glass hard drive encoded with innumerable hours of audio recorded from Wolfe’s life. Pick up an individual phone line, and you can explore different areas of Wolfe’s brain via the hopes, dreams, ideas, songs, conversations, and fears associated with each region.
Wolfe has included hundreds of hours of recordings from her life: everything from collaborations with astronomers and musicians to adolescent journal entries and road trips. The result is a vast aural landscape.
“It was so important for me that no two people have the same experience,” the Anglo-American Wolfe, who premiered “imPRINTING” during the 2023 London Design Biennale, at Somerset House, said by phone. “Anyone coming through will hear [a] unique kind of brain picture.”
Wolfe’s multidisciplinary approach to art making has included numerous collaborations over the years. Her environmental video project, “From Green to Red,” sets to music an arresting visualization of NASA data that charts rising CO2 levels over the past 800,000 years. “Smoke and Mirrors” uses the “Blue Marble” image of Earth to display rising methane levels juxtaposed with advertising slogans from the oil industry.
She’s set to release a series of records this spring with musician and producer Brian Eno, and she previously worked with Nobel Prize-winning scientist Robert Wilson to beam her album, “Raw Space,” into outer space using the Holmdel Horn Antenna, the radio telescope Wilson and Arno Penzias used to detect evidence of the Big Bang.
“Let’s see, if we’re six years out,” said Wilson of the transmission, “it’s six light years away — somewhere.”
The initial impetus for “imPRINTING” came more than a decade ago when Wolfe read “Musicophilia,” the late neurologist Oliver Sacks’s investigation into music’s effects on the brain. When her grandmother and father-in-law were diagnosed with dementia, Wolfe decided to try playing her guitar for her relatives, eventually performing for residents at her father-in-law’s facility in Portugal.
The response, she said, was revelatory: People who had previously been quiet began to perk up, clapping and talking to one another.
“There was this sense that there’s a responsibility to do something, to keep pulling the thread,” said Wolfe, who began performing at memory-care facilities across Britain. “The idea was to see if we could recreate what happened in Portugal, but with the controls, with doctors, and essentially do our own research piece.”
She added that as she toured, she witnessed “inexplicable” moments, describing one man who’d been “virtually catatonic.”
“The carers there were just hoping to get, you know, a smile or something,” said Wolfe, who noted that the man began moving his arm in time to the music. “Then, within two minutes of the song, he’s standing up. One of the carers is going over, and I’m thinking, what’s going on? And then I realized that they’re dancing.”
Nusha Askari, executive director of the Stanford Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, at Stanford University, said part of what she likes about Wolfe’s work is that it makes accessible the complexities of the brain.
“It’s so rare for someone to be able to draw from these different areas,” said Askari. “She has a beautiful way of integrating things.”
Even so, by the time organizers invited Wolfe to exhibit at the London Design Biennale, Wolfe said she’d grown frustrated by what she called the “binary roadmap” that differentiates artists from engineers.
“Why don’t I make something like a sonic self-portrait that shows all these different brain channels and simultaneously brings neurology to life,” Wolfe recalled thinking, “and also shows how we don’t have to be one thing or another.”
Wolfe had made a point of recording many of her adventures, and she poured hours and hours of audio into “imPRINTING.” For instance, the phone line to the “Inner Self” connects to the hippocampus, a small brain structure vital to learning and memory, revealing journal entries from her adolescence and teen years. The line that connects to the medial prefrontal cortex, a brain region associated with cognitive and emotional processing, is a “radio-style” channel that includes her space broadcast with Wilson and studio experiments with Eno, among other things. Meanwhile, a pair of lines to the limbic system, the so-called emotional nervous system, features music from throughout Wolfe’s career and new music available only through “imPRINTING.”
“Of course, to have all these brain channels, you need them to be coming out of a thinking cap,” said Wolfe. She added that the telephones are wired into the custom-made cap, which holds the audio in a novel glass technology that can store vast amounts of data without using energy.
“These tiny pieces of glass [in the cap] are at the point on the brain that they connect with,” she said. “If that part of the brain could talk, what would it sound like?”
Wolfe’s installation, which runs through the end of the year, will kick off a yearlong series of programming at the MoS devoted to being human.
James Monroe, the museum’s creative director of programming, said that in the coming year the museum will explore everything from how technology has changed our lives, to body systems, genetics, evolution, cures and treatments, mental health and aging.
Wolfe’s self-portrait “is going to touch on every single one of those themes for the year and be really inclusive,” he said. “I just thought it was a really sort of genius way of distilling some of that hardcore science into” something more accessible.
imPRINTING
Through Dec. 31. Museum of Science, 1 Science Park, 617-723-2500, www.mos.org
Malcolm Gay can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @malcolmgay.
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