The Space between Bodies: Exploring Contagion without Contact from Cohl’s Animated Cephaloscope (1910) to Feuerstein’s Borgy & Bes (2018)

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 neuroscience based 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” (Malabou 2008)?