“Cosa mentale. Les imaginaires de la télépathie dans l'art du XXe siècle” (2015-16) curated by Pascal Rousseau (contemporary art historian) explored the history of utopian thinking about thought and emotion transmission over more than a century. Taking as a starting point the year 1882, when the word “telepathy” came into use, the exhibition investigated the para-psychological phenomenon that strangely mixes art with science.
Focusing on the artistic imaginary of interpersonal non-linguistic communication, surveying the work of over a hundred avant-garde artists from Vassily Kandinsky to Susan Hiller, it parallels speculative imagination of possibility to “photograph” a thought (1895) and breakthrough scientific discoveries, such as the first electroencephalogram (1924) made by Hans Berger. In addition to considering antecedents to neuroscience and post-war counter-culture artists' obsession with the idea of communion with each other and their audience, the exhibition shows how the wildest products of human imagination (from mysticism to science fiction) anticipated the real forthcoming developments in information technology and telecommunication specifically.
The exhibition unfolded as a sequence of 5 chapters:
1) Introduction - centered around Rodin’s Thinker accompanied by media art of Nam June Paik,
2) Auras - the earliest attempts of visualizing thought and emotional states and their impact on the birth of abstract art,
3) Magnetic Fields - the spread of telepathy in the interwar period and its influence on surrealism,
4) Mind Expander - concurrent influence of cybernetics and psychedelic culture on conceptual art,
5) Telepathy - establishment of telematic and “telepathic” art.
The last chapter featured the brainwave music of David Rosenboom. He was also invited to perform his latest brainwave piece – Portable Gold and Philosophers' Stones (Deviant Resonances) (2015) at the exhibition preview on October 25 and the opening on October 27.
