Monadic Device

Abstract

In September in Sydney Contemporary 2018 in the former railway factory at Sydney’s Carriageworks, over a period of five days, I performed Monadic Device, a mechatronic painting machine assemblage whose operations and my participation were real-time and endurance-based. The work used a device to monitor my brain activity as the basis for a series of paintings. This was wearable technology in the form of a brain sensing headset, a consumer grade electroencephalogram (EEG). To make this work possible I produced custom software by working with an RA to use data streamed from the EEG to generate a line that wandered around the domain of the canvas avoiding the linear path it previously traced. The software specification detailed a drawing programme structured around the principle of self-avoiding random walks of the sort one might find in computer science blended with the mind wandering Psychic Automatism of French Surrealist Andre Masson. The progress of each hybrid wandering-self-avoiding line plotting brain energy was made visible to the public via the monitor of the laptop computer that controlled the painting machine and by the progress of the brush as it navigated its way around a series of linen canvases prepared for the artwork. To provide the artwork with an operational structure independent from the wall, I produced an open-cube framework made with modular and reusable aluminium elements including 25mm tube and assembly clamps. The structure encompassed all the operations of the work forming a new habitat or zone of creativity. The work was an open system, modelling, in plain sight, diagrammatically, the operations of a painting practice facilitated by digital methodologies and using signs derived from painting’s long history including linen canvas, oil paint and brush, a provisional artist’s studio and a human person. Over the course of Monadic Device, wearing the consumer grade EEG headset I engaged in a range of art-studio related activities to run the machine. These included: mixing paint and refilling the painting robot’s paint tray, using a wacom tablet to draw into the painting robot’s interface, reading Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, writing email correspondence, talking with the public, making telephone calls and drinking coffee. The project ran for five days and was an enormous undertaking in terms of research, cost, development and logistics.