Advances in neuroscientific research and imaging technologies implies that the brain is no longer an object of wonder. The imaging and writing tradition present in the neurosciences - the former based on morphological aspects and the latter on physiological ones – claims to capture immaterial entities and give them a material form in the guise of a written trace or a brain scan (Borck 2016). I argue that the residual spiritualist element which is present in materialist technologies such as brain imaging can be traced back to experiments in telepathy predating the official birth of the neurosciences in 1962. My paper traces a long-term trajectory of brain and neurosciencebased and inspired artworks, from telepathy through cybernetics to contemporary neurosciences. By analysing the almost forgotten lineage between telepathy and brain imaging through artworks such as the animated cinema
as “cephaloscope” of Émile Cohl’s ‘Le retapeur de cervelles’ (1910) and Thomas
Feuerstein’s neuroscience-based installations, I will highlight continuity and
transformations in the conceptualisation of the brain as a thinking and acting
entity. If the goal of telepathy and cybernetics was the search for direct
communication and tuning in across languages and life forms exorcising the
ghost in the machine of Cartesian memory, what do neuroscience-based and
inspired artworks want? Nowadays, as I will argue, having left behind the dusty
pathways of Cartesian dualism and of the cerebral subject (Vidal and Ortega 2017), neuroscience-based and inspired artworks engage us with Catherine Malabou’s question “what we should do with our brain”?
