Mental Work is an exhibition and large-scale participatory neuroscientific thought experiment. Executed in collaboration between the artist Jonathon Keats and neuroengineer José Millán, the project employs brain-machine interfaces (BMI) to explore philosophical questions surrounding the Industrial Revolution, society’s connection to emerging technologies and the future of work.
Potential labourers sign up for a 90-minute session and, upon arrival at the factory, are equipped with a dry, wireless EEG helmet with 24 electrodes. After a short training phase to learn the technique of modulating brain activity, workers are led onto the factory floor where three chromed mechanical sculptures await the mind-machine connection. In order to engage these devices, the worker must follow instructions on a tablet and reproduce the mental activity they practised during the training phase: imagining the muscle movements of opening and closing their hand to activate their motor cortex. Machine-learning algorithms interpret these electrical frequencies and their points of emanation to find brain patterns specific to individual participants.
As the workers navigate their assignment, they experience a progression from machine to machine in terms of both the mechanical intricacy of the sculptures and the design complexity of their respective interfaces – a narrative arc that begins with the awe and unfamiliarity of mind control, proceeds through a deeper understanding of its underlying mechanisms, and finishes with the revelation that no interface is ever fully complete. The first machine is a simple slider-crank mechanism activated by a piston, where a worker sends either a binary or continuous command to engage the sculpture. The second machine features a gearing system, which can be controlled in tandem with a co-worker who manipulates an internal parameter – the partner’s command threshold for successfully activating the device. The final and most complex machine introduces a new type of brain signal and comprises gears, a linkage system and two pistons – each of which is activated by a different brain signal selected by the co-worker.
In this way, Mental Work is designed to explore both the excitement of moving machinery with one’s mind, as well as the current limitations of BMI technology. Unlike most artistic expressions or technological demonstrations that employ passive EEG technology – a field in which it is currently near impossible to distinguish the signal output of a human brain from that of a wet sponge – Mental Work’s brain-machine interface mirrors the parameters used in contemporary neuroscience laboratories where users must consciously engage voluntary modulations of their neurological activity. It is exhausting work.
The tasks are not immediately accessible to everyone, although around 70 per cent of participants have been successful to date. Each of the three machines poses different practical and philosophical challenges. If the worker discovers the right strategy to send a strong enough signal, however, the brain-machine interface loop is completed and the machines glide into motion.
It is simultaneously a humbling and empowering experience. Less than a month before the exhibition’s opening, after five years of working on the project with more than two-dozen collaborators, I activated the first machine – it was an otherworldly sensation. Over the three months that Mental Work was operational at EPFL, my performance fluctuated from day to day, but the strangeness faded away, leaving comfortably intuitive control in its place: I had done this type of apprenticeship before. Whether learning to drive a car, navigating the intricacies of a new language or sending a signal to a machine, the brain’s capacity to adapt and find novel strategies is an infinite well of individual and collective potentiality. Technology is a way to exercise this potential, but if we wilfully ignore that it also holds the danger of unwanted consequences, we are heading blindly into a future that could one day be out of our control.
Jonathon Keats 