1st Edition
Affect, Intimacy and Ecology of Mind in Neurofeedback Art
0. Preface: Embodied Signals 1. Artists as Neural Orchestrators: Affective Modulations of Body-Mind-Environment Relations 2. Intimate Connections: Alternative Communication Threads in Nina Sobell’s Video Performances and Installations 3. Consonance and Dissonance: Fluctuating Mental Landscapes in Mariko Mori’s Wave UFO (1999 – 2003) and Suzanne Dikker and Matthias Oostrik’s Art-Sci Projects (2011 to present) 4. Planetary Re-Enchantment: Interspecies Entanglements in Victoria Vesna’s Octopus Brainstorming 5. Touching Minds: Ellen Pearlman’s Reframing of Traumatic Memories in Telematic Performances and Brain Operas 6. Epilogue
Biography
Cristina Albu is Associate Professor of Art History at University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA.
“Affect, Intimacy, and Ecology of Mind in Neurofeedback Art is a landmark contribution to the fields of art history, media studies, and the emerging discourse on brain-AI interfaces. This is a book that thinks deeply about what it means to be an embodied, interconnected, and vulnerable being in an age of accelerating neurotechnology. For the visual regime in which we are all embedded, this is essential reading.”
Gregory Minissale, Professor of Humanities, University of Auckland, NZ
“Albu’s deeply researched study traces a compelling genealogy of neurofeedback art across feminist media practices, cybernetics, and ecological thought. At a moment when AI and biometric systems increasingly shape visual culture and social life, this book demonstrates how artists anticipated critical questions surrounding affect, relationality, technological mediation, and the infrastructures of embodied experience.”
Gloria Sutton, Associate Professor, Northeastern University, US
“Albu’s book offers an outstanding analysis of artists’ deployment of neurofeedback or brainwave activity as medium to foreground the inextricably systemic relationships between body and mind, self and other. This important book offers a well-contextualized taxonomy of neurofeedback art from the mid-1960s to the present and impressively precise descriptions of complex works by artists like Nina Sobell, Victoria Vesna, Mariko Mori, and Ellen Pearlman. Incorporating theories of mind, affect, and new materialism, Albu synthesizes a distinctive feminist framework, privileging collaborative, participatory, and open-ended works encompassing the material, social, and cultural in the formation of an agential relational ethics. This well-researched visual and ethical analysis of the deeply integrated, tentacular nature of human thought couldn’t be more timely as we teeter on the precipice of AI, a technology that will inevitably shape thought and transform social relations.”
Christine Filippone, Professor of Art History, Millersville University of Pennsylvania, US
“Albu’s groundbreaking study of artistic uses of brain data suggests that attending to our bodies’ electric pulses opens new forms of interpersonal and inter-species understanding but also enables resistance to cognitive and corporate surveillance that shadow all forms of datafication.”
Kris Paulsen, Associate Professor of History of Art, Ohio State University, US, author of Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface
