Pierre Huyghe Mind's Eye (FL), 2021
Mind’s Eye is a materialized deep image reconstruction, a mental image output from UUmwelt, first presented at the Serpentine in 2018. UUmwelt is a co-production of imagination between human and machine, using a brain-computer interface.
A set of elementary components – building blocks of a speculative situation – were given as images or descriptions to be imagined by a subject, among them biological entities, prehistoric tools, machines, code, and artworks. As the subject imagines these components, brain activity was captured by an fMRI scanner and an engineered deep neural network learned to recognize the brain-data patterns and then attempted to reconstruct the mental images.
Mental images can circulate from mind to mind, outside the realm of appearance, as synthetic telepathic conversation, or be externalized from the subjects’ minds and manifest themselves physically.
Mind’s Eye is an artefact of the imaginary realm, a precipitate occupying the space. It lies in an ambiguous continuity between human visual imagination, artificial intelligence, data and matter.
— Pierre Huyghe