skills is that you need feedback from whatever activity you are generating such that you can learn to moderate it. Our brain is the only organ in our body that doesn’t have any sensor – we can feel all of our organs except the brain – and so this exhibition becomes the perfect sensory space in which to reflect on its activity. As Jonathon has said, these are abstract machines, detached from what they might have been initially designed for. That’s important because whenever we go public with our brain-control devices I worry that there may be false expectations from people who need such a system because of their physical disabilities. Detaching the machines from practicality is a way to say, “Look, this is where brain control technology is at the moment. Don’t be fooled by any news that you hear to the contrary.”
Jonathon The project is designed to problematise as much as it is to resolve. You start out with a case that offers a relatively straightforward relationship – you are mentally turning on and off a machine. Only when you come to subsequent machines do you start to realise the degree to which this is reliant on a whole backend system – a supervisor is capable of manipulating the algorithm for instance, or can switch you back and forth between different modes of actuation. I hope that’s a bit of a traumatic experience, in the sense of recognising all the ways in which interfaces hide so many of the decisions that have been made by others – the lack of actual control. If you are not going to make those decisions for yourself, you at least need to be aware of them. For instance, there is a whole question of how artificial intelligence may be biased in ways that disadvantage women, because women are less represented than men in the development of the technology. So one of the challenges is to bring more women into the technological process, but another is to make it such that the technology is accountable and can be interrogated. Part of what we’re trying to achieve here is a system that is not only capable of being interrogated, but which inherently must be interrogated and which interrogates you in the process. There’s an increasing amount of interest in trying to design possible futures. This practice of speculative design has especially been taken up by consultancies that work with companies, helping businesses position themselves for the near future. In effect, these designers are mercenary visual futurists. What is interesting with Mental Work is that we are putting forth a fiction in the form of a factory that everyone can engage in out of their own interest. It is a total fiction in which all aspects are put together, visually and narratively, to create a seamless internal experience for the audience. What is even more unusual is that this is not happening at the stage of a technology that is about to be available through Amazon, but rather something that is still in the lab. The process of reflection that would ordinarily take place when a speculative designer has been hired by a company is to develop some near-term way in which to make a product more appealing or even more functional. Here we are looking at a much more distant future. We’re exposing the earliest technological instantiations of the science, and even the science itself, to speculative design, and, in so doing, trying to find the best possible way forward.
José People use the term “speculative design”, but let me use another term, “disruptive design”, in the sense of confronting people with the limits of technology. If people come out of this experiment thinking that the technology is already there and that everything works fine, we have failed. We need to make people understand that they have choices around this technology. The word “responsibility” is very central for me. The human must be at the centre of the equation, which doesn’t mean that you need to be constantly aware and conscious of every single thing that is going on. We are not conscious of every single process in our bodies – thank God – because we would be drunk on the weight of 