The ghostless machine
Feb. 22nd, 2008 08:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustI was bowled over by Susan Aldworth's exhibition at the Sandford Goudie Gallery in South Shields, the more so because I had been a little apprehensive about it beforehand: the title (Scribing the Soul), the publicity which talked about "explor[ing] the nature of consciousness", even the image on the front of the hand-out (the same one as on the cover of the book) all suggested something a little New Age, a little abstract, even a little spiritual...
It wasn't like that at all. In a brilliantly lit white box of a gallery (actually three linked rooms, so three successive white boxes) the walls were hung with clear, precise, vivid pictures. These were explorations of the nature of consciousness not in an abstract, philosophical sense but as artistic transcriptions of closely observed medical processes - sometimes too closely observed for comfort, as the work has its origin in Susan Aldworth's reaction to the experience of observing her own brain live on a monitor during a diagnostic brain scan in 1999. Here is my brain, but where is my mind? I am watching myself think; but where is the I who is watching, and the self who is watched?
So one sequence starts from drawings produced on location while observing cerebral angiograms in an operating theatre, transmuted into etchings, brainscapes, maps of unknown territory, blueprints for a self-aware machine. At the end of the room the same blue is picked up by a set of four lightboxes. Two trace full-length figures, details of organs and bones like the portaits from a medieval tomb turned inside out; they are flanked by two smaller boxes on which the details to be picked out of the blue are not human features but words: there is no ghost in the machine.
It's reassuring to have that confirmed, because on the adjacent wall a further series, entitled The self is a shadow-puppet, are full of ghosts, handprints flat under the glass, reaching out from the chaos. Elsewhere, eyes peer out unexpectedly - from the installation of 20 prints entitled Cogito Ergo Sum (second from bottom on the left of this gallery page, though the tiny reproduction doesn't convey the impact of the real thing). Each image is separately framed, stands alone, and the eye travels back and forth across the wall of images, spotting patterns, variations, details.
Meanwhile, on the opposite wall, individual cells undergo apoptosis in the luminous red of fresh blood, while at the end of a gallery two short films repeat on and endless loop. There's music, too, improvised by Between the Notes in response to the Brainscape etchings. it's a small exhibition, yet there is too much here to take in at once; there are things I could live with for a long time, and others it may not be easy to exorcise.
It wasn't like that at all. In a brilliantly lit white box of a gallery (actually three linked rooms, so three successive white boxes) the walls were hung with clear, precise, vivid pictures. These were explorations of the nature of consciousness not in an abstract, philosophical sense but as artistic transcriptions of closely observed medical processes - sometimes too closely observed for comfort, as the work has its origin in Susan Aldworth's reaction to the experience of observing her own brain live on a monitor during a diagnostic brain scan in 1999. Here is my brain, but where is my mind? I am watching myself think; but where is the I who is watching, and the self who is watched?
So one sequence starts from drawings produced on location while observing cerebral angiograms in an operating theatre, transmuted into etchings, brainscapes, maps of unknown territory, blueprints for a self-aware machine. At the end of the room the same blue is picked up by a set of four lightboxes. Two trace full-length figures, details of organs and bones like the portaits from a medieval tomb turned inside out; they are flanked by two smaller boxes on which the details to be picked out of the blue are not human features but words: there is no ghost in the machine.
It's reassuring to have that confirmed, because on the adjacent wall a further series, entitled The self is a shadow-puppet, are full of ghosts, handprints flat under the glass, reaching out from the chaos. Elsewhere, eyes peer out unexpectedly - from the installation of 20 prints entitled Cogito Ergo Sum (second from bottom on the left of this gallery page, though the tiny reproduction doesn't convey the impact of the real thing). Each image is separately framed, stands alone, and the eye travels back and forth across the wall of images, spotting patterns, variations, details.
Meanwhile, on the opposite wall, individual cells undergo apoptosis in the luminous red of fresh blood, while at the end of a gallery two short films repeat on and endless loop. There's music, too, improvised by Between the Notes in response to the Brainscape etchings. it's a small exhibition, yet there is too much here to take in at once; there are things I could live with for a long time, and others it may not be easy to exorcise.
