sm which had significant religious implications. I wanted to borrow from this tradition of the philosophical instrument, and that purely mental interaction where a machine is there to help augment your thought processes. It seems that an exhibition space can be reflective, but only if the exhibited mechanism is detached from some sort of external purpose or practicalities. The space has to become a self-contained world that operates according to its own internal logic and has its own self-reinforcing aesthetic. That is one of the reasons why we chromed these machines. Having a set of machines that are immaculate allows for a relationship with them that is not industrial – you wouldn’t chrome these machines if you were using them to operate a mill, for instance. By chroming them, the physical work that they can do is undercut by their immaculate finish: this perfection can only exist as long as we are in the space of doing philosophy, as opposed to milling wood. This allows for a relationship that is not industrial and which is ultimately otherworldly. It doesn’t belong to any particular place or time, and as a result it allows for that kind of movement back and forth between the Industrial Revolution and the Cognitive Revolution, as well as an extrapolation forward in time.
José In my lab, we don’t put too much effort into the final product – if you produce things that are too rigid, you are constraining, not helping, research. Having said that, something I am particularly proud of is the fact that we put a lot of attention to detail into how the subjects of the research in our lab – people with physical disabilities – interact with systems that allow them to regain control of parts of their body. When they interact with the final machine, it is seamless. When you’re in front of these Mental Work machines, you feel like you’re reflecting upon them, and they’re conveying back the mental effort you’re putting in. It’s a kind of mirror, which is a powerful image because a basic principle for acquiring brain-control 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