This unconventional exhibition showcases the work of nationally renowned artist China Blue and her team Seth Horowitz and Christopher Konopka. Together they craft an almost transcendent experience through sight and sound, leaving gallery visitors viscerally connected to the inner workings of their minds.
“Creativity of Consciousness” allows visitors to simultaneously explore both neuroscience concepts and human creativity.” states artist China Blue.
Through traditional 2-D paintings and 3-D immersive art installations, participants are provided access to explore how external reality can be formed and manipulated via their internal mental states.
“Creativity of Consciousness” features three distinct sections: two interactive artworks and a series of paintings. “Imagining Blue” is an interactive brainwave sculpture that responds to a participant’s mind by dynamically changing in light, motion and sound. With this sculpture, users are able to watch their brain in action.
By accessing mental states of relaxation, meditation, focus or excitation MindDraw enables participants to drive the shape and speed of projected imagery. The resulting illustration changes in real time reflecting the state of the participant's brain.
“Memory Network” is a series of paintings that reflect how we may connect and hold on to our life experiences. Inspired by the brain scans of Alzheimer’s patients, China Blue uses these images as maps, filling the empty spaces with aluminum-based paint. These connected, shiny globules make stunning displays of the delicate, fragile impermanence of our experiences and memories.
Through the creative practice, brainwaves can be interpreted and experienced in real-time, as aestheticized color and form. As the enigma of the mind begins to fall away, visitors discover a playground of wonder and awe as their own body is illuminated. Quite tacitly, through the creative experience, we become more appreciative of our bodies’ nuances as we understand ourselves through the personalized stories narrated through these works of art.
The work MindDraw is a real-time interactive viewer participation work that enables people to create beautiful brain based images. By accessing their mental states of relaxation, meditation, focus or just by thinking, the participants drive the shape and speed of the imagery.
China Blue’s series of paintings “Memory Networks” explore how we connect and hold on to our life experiences. Our recollections occur in fragments that arrive as flashes detached from time. Because memory is transient, “Memory Network” paintings propose a network as a method to connect and save our experiences.
Based on areas areas in the brain thought to be related to memory storage the artist shapes these spaces with shiny aluminum based globules and connects them to make stunning examples of one way to hold onto our thoughts and experiences. Modeled after neural nets by linking them and preserving them in beautiful figurative abstract images, China Blue is proposing a way to safeguard our recollections.