Greg Dunn, Brian Edwards

Year
2014–2016

Medium / Material / Technic
Video excerpt, color, 30 sec.

Video by Will Drinker

»Self Reflected«, designed to be a highly accurate representation of a slice of the brain profile, is informed by deep neuroscience research and functions as a reliable educational tool as well as a work of art.

The complex process of the work’s production started with manually painting 500,000 neurons in an anatomically accurate fashion. These drawings were then scanned to digitally create realistic paths or axons between half a million neurons. To reproduce the dynamism of neural circuitry, the artists used a three-dimensional microscopic engraving technique which makes static surfaces appear as animated images – they made angled grooves on metal panels to reflect light and then coated them with gold leaf to increase reflectivity. Similar microscopic engraving is used in microelectronics.

Finally, the micro-etched surface was lit through 162 remotely controlled modular LEDs. In this way, the moving light revealed the paths of neural signals at slow pace, thus representing 500 microseconds of brain activity within five seconds.

Brain mapping often applies a big-data approach, analyzing groups of 86 billion neurons. The video presented here provides a unique analogue yet animated example of such mapping.