Join us on Thursday, January 16 at 6pm CST (7pm EST/4pm PST) for a screening and discussion with artist Nina Sobell, tracing her groundbreaking BrainWave Drawing video installations throughout her career. Moderated by art historian Cristina Albu.

In 1973, Sobell worked with engineer Michael Trivich and neuropsychologist Dr. M. Barry Sterman to create her first BrainWave Drawing installation. Using equipment including a PDP-12 at in the Neuropsychology Laboratory of the Veterans Administration Hospital in Sepulveda, California, Sobell and her collaborators connected two people to an EEG machine and provided a monitor for them, measuring their brainwaves and compositing them into a single abstract image, which they could watch superimposed over a video close-up of their faces. For the pool participants, the aim was to sync up their brainwaves to create more coherent images – not something that could be directly controlled. Rather, “syncing up” meant achieving the same energy, the same mood, and inadvertently matching their brainwaves too. The resulting installation was a visually stunning, profound study of the unspoken commonalities and communications between two people. There was, truly, nothing else like it.

Since then, Sobell has revisited the idea of BrainWave Drawing numerous times, incorporating new technology for measuring and visualizing the subjects’ brainwaves. Join us for an overview of Sobell’s BrainWave Drawings through the years, followed by a discussion with Sobell and Albu.

Attendance is free but advanced registration is required. Click HERE [ https://www.eventbrite.com/e/virtual-talks-with-video-activists-brainwave-drawings-with-nina-sobell-tickets-1141248046629?aff=oddtdtcreator ] to register for this event.

Nina Sobell is a contemporary sculptor, multimedia, and performance artist who pioneered the use of EEG technology, closed-circuit television, and internet communication. Early in her career, she focused on experimental forms of interaction and performance, and explored the ways in which technology mediates psychic transformations and modulates the perception of space and time. Her substantial body of work includes live performance and TV, museum installations, sculpture, and interactive video matrices that invited public participation. Her work has been exhibited or screened all over the world, including the Getty Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, the de Saisset Museum, Banff Centre for the Arts, Manchester Gallery, the Contemporary Art Museum-Houston, the DIA Foundation, the Venice Biennale, The Whitney Museum, and many, many others. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including grants from the NEA and the New York State Council on the Arts. Her video work can be viewed on Media Burn’s website.

Cristina Albu is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her research addresses how contemporary art enables us to question what and how we perceive. It focuses on artists’ uses of new media such as video and biofeeedback technology to enhance attention and highlight the fluidity of selfhood and interpersonal exchanges. She is the author of Mirror Affect: Seeing Self, Observing Others in Contemporary Art (Minnesota University Press, 2016). Albu is also co-editor (with Dawna Schuld) of a volume of essays titled Perception and Agency in Shared Spaces of Contemporary Art (Routledge, 2018). Her writings have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and anthologies, including Hybrid Practices: Art in Collaboration with Science and Technology in the Long 1960s, Framings, The Permanence of the Transient, Crossing Cultures.

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Tags: BrainWave Drawings with Nina Sobell, Cristina Albu, Media Burn Archive, Nina Sobell, Online, Virtual Talks with Video Activists: BrainWave Drawings with Nina Sobell