Coming soon! The report from New Zealand!
read the review from the june 2000 new art examiner
Electroencephalograph/Mental Notes
The musical translation of 3 tracks of electroencephalograph output into a trio for soprano, tenor and soprano recorder, created by Jennifer Gwirtz, performed by Jennifer Gwirtz, John Baumann and Laura Marsh.
This piece has been seen in "Neural Notations," an exhibit that has been seen at the SF Arts Commission, the Sesnon Gallery in Santa Cruz and will be travelling to The Physics Room Trust in Christchurch, New Zealand in January, 2001.
E.E.G.: a chant in the key of alpha
This piece is the first of a series about the intersections of mind and brain, created during the spring of 1997 and performed in May at Fort Mason's Herbst Pavilion in San Francisco. The performance was a vocal recital which came from the manual translation of the output of my electroencephelograph test onto a major scale. I displayed the pencil drawings and blown-up e.e.g. output on the walls of the performance space. The performance happened on the opening night and then once a day for a week.
A person who lives with seizures experiences interruptions or warpings of consciousness. My experiences as a person with epilepsy has colored my work as an artmaker. Beneath all of my explorations lies a fascination with the mystery of the self, and how it intersects with the body.
During my mid-twenties, I began to see a neurologist who tested me on an electroencephelograph. This machine detected the tiny electrical currents in the brain to discover potential abnormalities.* Electrodes on my head would communicate information to several pens which scribbled on a long scroll of paper for twenty minutes as I drowsed and responded to stimuli like a flashing light and tapping noises. When I asked the technician and my doctor how this information was understood, their answers were vague, so I began to research brainmapping on my own.
The doctors of the University of California, San Francisco's Epilepsy Center were extremely helpful. They took me into their control room where patients with intractable seizures were monitored around the clock through implanted electrodes connected to constantly running electroencephelograph machines. Seizures, the doctor explained, can happen for many reasons, some of them bizarre, such as types of sound or visual stimulus, and even scent. Sometimes the cause of a seizure is as elusive as the seizure itself. When I asked about brainmapping, the doctor explained that the medical community actually knows very little about why the brain does what it does. Brainmapping, he explained, is a relative process. Each track of the output is studied and judged against the whole readout and any other factors which are pulled in, such as an MRI, witness and patient accounts.
I realized that the graphic image which this machine produces is as much a mystery as any of the other aspects of the human mind and personality. We can make educated guesses, but the leap of faith is still there.
It is this gap that interests me because it is what makes us most vulnerably human. In the unknown is a source for the eternal human question that wonders where we go when we are no longer in our bodies. We search endlessly, but will never find an answer so long as we are in the bodies and minds which are the subject of the mystery. To me, the image that this machine produces is a form of translation, and is an example of how human beings attempt to grasp their surrounding environments. For that reason, I use translation in my art process.