2020
traces of the past
The work highlights the relationship between the physical/tangible material in memory and the mental information it triggers. The key question is what is the future of photography in the context of contemporary remembering, which I touch upon by destroying the analogue photography, layering mental and material information and exposing the intrusion of the digital world into the analogue/sensory experience of man.
As part of the Traces of the Past series, I am exploring the electroencephalography (EEG) technology. I began to look for connections between the process of remembering and the brain reactions and changes that take place in this process.
I used the photographs from my family photo album as triggers for remembering while recording my own brainwaves for each individual photograph with an EEG device. I later used alpha, delta and theta waves, which are active in the process of memory reconstruction. The end result of the experiment or work is a series of photographs that are damaged/burned by the laser in such a way that an image on a photograph remains only where there is a drawing of a graph of the brain waves that were active during the process of remembering with each photograph.
I recorded my brain activity at home, with which I acquired the information about memory and mental reactions that occur in the brain during the process of remembering. Recording and reading of brainwaves with an 80-year-old technology, which has been the inspiration of many science fiction ideas and has until recently been inaccessible to everyday users, is now penetrating from the scientific institutions into home environments (commercialization of EEG devices and with it the information economy of brain data). What will happen to this data in the future, will the technologies really enter our most intimate corners of life, our brain? What will happen to our perception and how will the manipulability of memory be expressed in the future?
For the time being, this technology provides us with incomprehensible information for laypeople, which, however, helps scientists to better understand the functioning of the brain. In new discoveries and with new technologies, this information can already be transformed into visual and thus still vague but partially readable images which suggest that in the near future, it may be possible to read thoughts, perhaps also making it possible to record our own memories directly from the brain.