One of Kellyann Geurts’s rendering of a thought made through digital art and EEG brain scans

The artist that caught my eye when starting this project was Kellyann Geurts, a senior learning and teaching advisor at RMIT University. Her work focuses on the science of brain imaging through the ages and how it has shaped and evolved our culture, specifically in the area of science fiction. Geurts uses EEG brain scans from willing participants and combines them with her digital art skills to create a new way of seeing thought patterns. She focuses not only on the mind and thoughts themselves but also on the way the thoughts are captured and portrayed in the media. Her work is not only limited to futuristic images of thought patterns however, it extends all the way to more contemporary still photography.

A photograph from one of Kellyann Geurts’s exhibitions featuring wires sprouting from the cap of an EEG machine

In a photograph of EEG wires sprouting from the head of a participant the artist makes connections to the film The Matrix and comments on the importance of, “not so much the depiction of the thought form but rather the device and the effect of the thought (doc 2).” She alludes to the mind being like an object, something we see as uncapturable, something that cannot be pinned down let alone snapped a photo of. However Geurts does exactly this through her science-based digital art and she loosely refers to it as a form of thoughtography.

Although Geurts’s work is beautiful and portrays science in a whole new light I would like to broaden her concepts to a more global and personal scale. Not everyone is interested in science fiction but everyone thinks every minute of every day, I wanted to explore that idea and how it connects us as people.