Patterns of Pathology

This Augmented Reality (AR) work is based on an exchange between artist-researcher Marlene Bart and science and culture historian Flora Lysen. Together, they examine pattern recognition in EEG recordings, taking data originally recorded in the 1940s as their starting point. The pair discussed the initial hope at the inception of the technology that EEG could distinguish between "normal" and "abnormal" brain activity. However, it quickly became evident that human biases heavily influenced these diagnoses. Contemporary goals, such as implementing artificial intelligence to automate this diagnostic process and - ideally - thereby make it objective, revealed that even these automated systems continued to perpetuate human biases of their creators. This AR work employs artistically derived algorithmic operations that utilize seven EEG datasets from women in the same age range as Bart and Lysen. These datasets are sourced from the Atlas of Electroencephalography by Frederic and Erna Gibbs, an extensive collection of EEG data compiled in 1941. The exchange between Bart and Lysen which underpins this body of work began in 2023 and was initiated as part of a project with the Max Planck Research Group "Biomedical Sciences."