Art imitating life

Last month’s Focal Point featured a breathtaking image from a project titled Self Reflected. But who was behind this intricate artwork? Laboratory News spoke to one of the creative brains behind this created brain – Dr Greg Dunn

Dr Dunn’s unusual journey to becoming an artist began in 2011 after finishing a doctorate in Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. While studying, Dr Dunn noticed that neural forms match the aesthetics of minimalist Asian art, especially sumi-e scroll, and gold leaf painting.

Not, it’s true to say, your average finding for a neuroscience PhD – but it is exactly this unconventional streak which gives Dunn a distinct edge. “My non-traditional path to art through a neuroscience doctorate arms me with an outsider’s perspective,” he says. “It gave me the freedom to introduce imagery and concepts derived from a different world than traditionally encountered in fine art.”

Self Reflected – an incredible work by Dunn and collaborator, artist and applied physicist Dr Brian Edwards – explores the nature of human consciousness by attempting to recreate how electrical impulses travel through the brain. Using a novel technique called reflective microetching, the duo depict the complexities of the brain, with signals seeming to spark and travel as your eyes move across the image. It is, says Edwards, perhaps the most fundamental self-portrait ever created – a hyperdetailed animated representation of human consciousness designed to mirror the functioning of the viewer’s own mind in the very moment that you are observing the piece.

Natural complexity A bold claim indeed. Yet when confronted with the original version of Self Reflected – permanently exhibited at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia – it must be hard to disagree. The towering work (it is a monumental 2.44m x 3.3m) depicts 500 microseconds of ‘brain time’ to highlight electrical activity in approximately 500,000 neurons with the aid of 144 LEDs. This clearly shows Dunn’s intention to depict the brain’s natural complexity as much as possible. An intention underscored by the sheer amount of research that went into creating the piece – research that involved advice and data from numerous neuroscientists and neurologists to ensure it resembled both the structure and function of a human brain as closely as possible.

And when it came to structure and function, they certainly didn’t take the easy route. The artists decided on an oblique sagittal slice of the human brain as it provides a wide range of structural variety and fascinating circuitry. It also avoids areas of the brain – ventricles – that would have appeared as holes in the finished piece. University of Pennsylvania neuroscience graduates Melissa Beswick and Carl Wittig were recruited to pore over the neuroscientific literature in order to collect data for each region. No easy task in itself – especially given the information Dunn needed contained details such as neuron types, sizes, connections to other regions and neuronal firing patterns. Such was the attention to detail for Self Reflected they hope it can be used as a reliable educational tool – indeed there are future plans to create educational kits complete with images and videos.

Brain of steel Based on the data collected, around 100 different neural cell types were hand painted, before being scanned and turned into vectors. In order to recreate axons – which go to make up the white matter of the brain – diffusion spectrum imaging was contributed by Dr John Pyles of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition in Philadelphia. Similar to an MRI scan, the technology generates images through the diffusion of water molecules. Additional use of both hand drawings and computer programmes enabled the final designs to be created, at which stage photolithography was used to create a three dimensional, wave like surface.

In this painstaking process – Dunn and Edwards coated stainless steel in a soft, light sensitive polymer known as photoresist before employing some very cunning use of transparencies. By selectively printing on the transparencies it is possible to prevent light from hitting the photoresist, which is useful because when light hits the polymer its surface will harden. In essence, by carefully creating a negative, the team burnt the details they wanted into the surface of the coated steel. This was carried out on 25 sheets which were then hand gilded with almost 1,800 sheets of 22 karat gold, to increase the surface’s reflectivity when viewed.

Simple it isn’t It has been an impressive effort and one that has had spectacular results – although you certainly wouldn’t call the experience of viewing the piece ‘simple’, something Dunn is more than fine with. “Self Reflected was not created to simplify the brain’s functionality for easier consumption,” he says. “But rather to depict it as close to its native complexity as possible so that the viewer comes away with a visceral and emotional understanding of its beauty.”

As for the inspiration behind all this work? We’ll leave the final word to Dr Dunn: “My work is neonaturalist, based on natural forms and influenced by scientific advancements that allow us to perceive the universe beyond human senses. Neonaturalism harmonises unfamiliar scientific imagery and techniques with experimental artistic scaffolding. It fuses the worlds of concept and aesthetics, chaos and order, art and data. This approach visually, conceptually, and technologically brings the scientific method into design and technique to produce pieces demonstrating surprising and sometimes beautifully abstract notions about the unseen while commenting on the common foundations of art and science in communicating human experience.”

[caption id="attachment_60233" align="alignnone" width="465"] Dr Greg Dunn. Credit: Will Drinker[/caption]

Self Reflected was carried out after Dunn and Edwards received the National Science Foundation EAGER award. This is a grant designed for transformative or exploratory research that explores new subjects, different methods of interdisciplinary approaches.

For more information about Self Reflected, visit www.gregadunn.com to view a range of videos as well as various prints and microetchings available for sale.