BMCAN’s Winter Exhibition at The Edge featured three large striking paintings by Jacquelene Drinkall that captured my interest.  As someone whose professional life was shaped by my experience as a sociologist of technological innovation, as a Buddhist practitioner for whom the idea of ‘telepathy’ has other resonances, and as someone deeply interested in ways of knowing encoded in pre-industrial cultures, Jacqueline was someone I wanted to meet and talk with.

Her three works on exhibit were:

—‘Can We Transcend The Telepathic Singularity’

—‘An Information Theory of Telepathy with Telepathic Geometry and Images’

—‘Global Media Recursivity with Telepathic Plants and Animals’

Intrigued by her works, I caught up with her at home in Wallerawang, which lies about halfway between Lithgow and Bathurst.  Seated at the table with views out over Lake Wallace, we settled in for a wide ranging discussion about ‘ways of knowing’ and to talk  about her art.Teleplasticity Exhibition in Tasmania

Recently returned from a stint at the University of Tasmania, Jacquelene grew up in Bathurst where her life as an artist is influenced by her late musician father who also worked as a cartographer for a land mapping agency, and her mother who is a keen photographer.

Jacquelene studied at the ANU National Arts School, and then graduated with a research-based thesis ‘Telepathy in Contemporary, Conceptual and Performance Art’ for her PhD from the UNSW School of Art and Design that explored her artistic and intellectual interest in the phenomena of telepathy and its intersection with recent developments in science.

This led to her collaboration with Warren Neidich, founder of artbrain.org, which engages with the activist neuroaesthetics movement. This collaboration is soon taking her to Tasmania to participate in a new iterative exhibition, ‘Teleplasticity, Teleplasti City and Activist Neuroaesthetics in Video Art’, some of which was originally exhibited in Berlin in 2021. As well as artists from Tasmania, the Tasmanian exhibition also involves Blue Mountains-based artists, David Haines, Joyce Hinterding, Sarah Breen Lovett and Ben Denham. Jacquelene’s contribution will be her recent ‘Telepathic Environment’ object and painting work.

The term teleplasticity is derived from the psychic arts and electrical science for materialising things that are coded, referencing the neuroplasticity of the brain; its ability to defy predictability and change itself through recursivity and feedback, always building new neuronal connections through how we use our brains.

One of the experiments that established the neuroplasticity of the brain was conducted with some Buddhist meditation practitioners who were able to demonstrate the way in which the brain responded to meditation, and reinforces the Buddhist axiom from the ancient text, the Dhammapada.

We are are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts.  With our thoughts we make the world.  Speak or act with an impure mind and trouble will follow you, as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.

We are what we think.  All that we are arises with our thoughts.  With our thoughts we make the world.  Speak or act with a pure mind and happiness will follow you as your shadow unshakeable.

The Tibetan Buddhist teachings compare mind to a crystal.  Just as a crystal adopts the colour of whatever surface you place it on, the mind will become just whatever we allow to occupy it. In this way the Buddhists say, our lived experience is a world of karmic phenomena fashioned by our thoughts and actions.  For this reason, when our minds are immersed in social media, either in search of gratification through ‘selfies’ and ‘influencers’ or in search of revenge gratification through social media trolling of those we disagree with, these actions shape our world, our lived experience.

If we ‘cook’ ourselves in venting anger and frustration, that anger can easily take us over.  If we ‘cook’ ourselves in generosity and goodwill, that too will permeate our sense of ourselves and those around us.  The more we do something – be it in thought or action, the more this shapes the neuronal connectivity in our brains.  This is the vital import of neuroplasticity.The Painting—Global Media Recursivity with Telepathic Plants and Animals

Jacquelene talked me through the inspiration of her painting, ‘Global Media Recursivity with Telepathic Plants and Animals’, as a work of activist neuroaeshetics, and a commentary on appropriation and theories of mind.

Although the painting is visually arresting in its own right, it soon became apparent that the viewer needs to understand the ‘story’ of this painting to really gain access to its depth of meaning-making. Paintings such as these are grounded in the activist speculative philosophy movement that is inspiring artist activists and philosophers in Italy and with a strong following at the UK Goldsmith Arts College.

Jacquelene has had a long interest in the use of weaving as a metaphor, especially with telecom wire, which visually and conceptually influences her work. In this work she builds up a representation of a cyberspace-cybernetic screen mesh, which also references a TV screen gone haywire. Within this cybernetic screen mesh she talked about the small images that are captured from the Internet. In the top left is an image of Kurdish women fighters training to enter into tunnels, with these women a symbol of feminist spirit and resistant anarchism. In the top centre is an image of Bryan Johnson, a tech oligarch doing pioneering work on brain-computer interfaces for the treatment of mental illness, and who is influenced by the time he spent as a young Mormon missionary in South America.

Below him is an image of a cross section of ayahuasca, a psychedelic plant widely used in Indigenous Amerindian cultures in the Amazon for dream visioning and healing, and where this cross section also references the human brain.

For Jacquelene, Johnson’s work is problematic as it represents an accelerationist form of capitalism, even if more ethically driven that the brain-computer interface work of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Towards the bottom left is an image of the Lyrebird, the bush mimic – another form of telepathy.

Then vertically across the left and right side of the painting are the neuron tendrels of the brains of a ferret and of a human. Also in the background are textual quotes from media statements from the World Economic Forum and the Washington Post about Facebook becoming a ‘form of telepathy’ with its instant messaging and plans to develop brain-computer interfaces, virtual and augmented reality. The circular forms with their hard edges reference the intrusion of the ‘hard edges’ of platform capitalism and accelerationist technology.Neuroaesthetics

So what is Activist Neuroaesthetics?

Jacquelene explained that it’s a reaction to the role of big data and social media in shaping human experience and identity in the new world of platform capitalism shaped by behemoths like Google, Amazon, Facebook (Meta) and Chinese platforms like WeChat—all driven by an ‘extractivist logic’ for creating value for their owners. She has been exploring activist neuoaeshetics through her collaboration with NY-based Warren Neidich, founder of Artbrain.org, founded in 1996 wth Nathalid Anglers.

Over the last 25 years, artbrain.org has developed alternative vocabularies and practices with which to rethink the fields that describe sensation, perception and cognition. Since 1998, Neidich has continued the project and developed the term Activist Neuroaesthetics to describe an enactive approach to neuroaesthetics that not only understands the importance of neural plasticity in the material brain, but recognizes art as a generator of diversity which has the capacity to induce complexity and variability – which in turn is an important factor for understanding, and consciously enacting, social and political transformation.

Activist Neuroaesthetics concerns artists using their own histories, techniques, apparatuses, materials and theoretical constructs to investigate the same fields of knowledge as cognitive neuroscience, but to produce an alternative discourse concerning perception and cognition where events going on inside and outside the brain coevolve together and our cognitive abilities are expanded, rather than normalised.

Activist Neuroaesthetics is a generalized theoretical and aesthetic approach that refutes the dogma of what is known as Positive Neuroaesthetics. Positivist neuroaesthetics is a reductionist methodology that attempts to explain the aesthetic field and its production (artworks) by referring to neuroanatomical models aided by technology (i.e. neuroimaging).

Its goals are to explain artworks, such as paintings, through its effects upon the brain’s neural processing itself rather than as something happening independently, or outside of the material brain’s jurisdiction (for example, in relation to events and processes happening in the world of art). It refutes the importance of the history of art as a causal factor in art production and conspires with capitalism to recuperate its most radical claims in order to make it palatable and normalised.

Here, the brain not only refers to the intracranial brain consisting of neurologic matter, but also the situated body and the extracranial brain composed of gestalts, affordances, linguistic atmospheres and socially-engaged interactions.

Activist Neuroaesthetics refuses the cynicism of Big Data, neural consumerism and DARPA generated technologies (such as optogenetics), and instead promotes an ethics of neural plastic emancipation and neural diversity to produce artistic facts, rather than scientific ones, that are organised into a generalised paradigm of resistance.