When I was a little kid, I used to daydream and wonder about crazy, impossible things. As young as three, I remember stubbornly mulling over existential problems like: “if there is such a thing as God, then what God created that God?” Over the years, that tendency to dream big, crazy, and sometimes surreal things has proved itself a motivating force in my pursuit of challenging the limits of what is considered “impossible.”
By the time I reached my late-20s, I had become engrossed with electronic music and fascinated with this realm of music as it inched closer and closer to a synergetic immediacy between composer and computer. I found myself dreaming about the day I’d be able to connect my brain directly to a computer or synthesizer and transmute my thoughts, emotions, and the correlative harmonies and melodies they triggered in my head into a tangible waveform. And lo and behold…that day has arrived
My desire towards a “synergetic immediacy” is now mirrored in contemporary EEG and eye-tracking technology. The BBC released a short news reel video Tuesday on their website that takes a look at these rapidly developing technologies and their application as control devices for computers and interactive media.
What was once only dreamed of is becoming physically extent and apparent. As we further develop our understanding of the subtle bioelectrical circuitry of the brain, we will be able to provide more accurate tracking of thought, emotion, and concentration, thereupon breaking through the “impossibility” barriers of all fields of science, art, and present-day techno-culture. Only two years ago, Robert Schneider, a toy-hacker and musician from the band Apples In Stereo, created what he calls the “teletron.” His experiments and performances were covered in this Wired article.
Anyone who has ever experienced a psychedelic trip through the vast unknown territories of the human mind can only imagine what might be possible once we are able to reverse the journey of those brilliant, hyper-intense fractal landscapes that are traversed when music collides with an altered human bio-computer. When that wormhole of terror, delight, and vision can find its way conversely back through the connective apparatus (EEG and similar tech) that will soon bridge the internal microcosm with the external creative and engineering tools, who knows what kind of hyper-real macrocosm will be possible? We might find ourselves looking into some crazy existential mirror of another sort—watching our collectively “wired” culture creating the next offspring in a virtual world of light and sound, becoming gods in our own right, over the domain of the imagination and what it might manifest. Brain-music is only the beginning…
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