This book charts the history of neurofeedback art from the mid-1960s to the present. It examines how artists have paired electroencephalography (EEG) brainwave readings with fluctuating sounds, lights, or images to reveal the embodied and relational nature of the mind.
Offering a comprehensive exploration of performances and participatory installations based on neurofeedback technology, the volume investigates emotionally charged aesthetic scenarios which invite reflection on telepathic communication, body-mind balance, and the entanglement of material, social, and cultural factors shaping consciousness. The analysis uncovers the porosity and malleability of our nervous systems while drawing critical attention to questions of individual agency over brainwave rhythms in an age of cognitive optimization and commodified brain data. By examining these artworks, readers gain insight into the need for an ecology of the embodied mind—one that accounts for interpersonal relations and balanced environments as essential conditions for improved mental states.
Designed for an interdisciplinary audience, the work addresses art historians, artists, and curators focused on intersections between art, science, and technology, as well as philosophers of mind, cognitive scientists, and neurofeedback technology developers interested in the relationship between aesthetic experience, interpersonal awareness, and emotional states.
Table of Contents:
0. Preface: Embodied Signals 1. Artists as Neural Orchestrators: Affective Modulations of Body-Mind-Environment Relations 2. Intimate Connections: Alternative Communication Threads in Nina Sobell’s Video Performances and Installations 3. Consonance and Dissonance: Fluctuating Mental Landscapes in Mariko Mori’s Wave UFO (1999 – 2003) and Suzanne Dikker and Matthias Oostrik’s Art-Sci Projects (2011 to present) 4. Planetary Re-Enchantment: Interspecies Entanglements in Victoria Vesna’s Octopus Brainstorming 5. Touching Minds: Ellen Pearlman’s Reframing of Traumatic Memories in Telematic Performances and Brain Operas 6. Epilogue
About the Author :
Cristina Albu is Associate Professor of Art History at University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA.
Review :
“Affect, Intimacy, and Ecology of Mind in Neurofeedback Art is a landmark contribution to the fields of art history, media studies, and the emerging discourse on brain-AI interfaces. This is a book that thinks deeply about what it means to be an embodied, interconnected, and vulnerable being in an age of accelerating neurotechnology. For the visual regime in which we are all embedded, this is essential reading.”
Gregory Minissale, Professor of Humanities, University of Auckland, NZ
“Albu’s deeply researched study traces a compelling genealogy of neurofeedback art across feminist media practices, cybernetics, and ecological thought. At a moment when AI and biometric systems increasingly shape visual culture and social life, this book demonstrates how artists anticipated critical questions surrounding affect, relationality, technological mediation, and the infrastructures of embodied experience.”
Gloria Sutton, Associate Professor, Northeastern University, US
“Albu’s book offers an outstanding analysis of artists’ deployment of neurofeedback or brainwave activity as medium to foreground the inextricably systemic relationships between body and mind, self and other. This important book offers a well-contextualized taxonomy of neurofeedback art from the mid-1960s to the present and impressively precise descriptions of complex works by artists like Nina Sobell, Victoria Vesna, Mariko Mori, and Ellen Pearlman. Incorporating theories of mind, affect, and new materialism, Albu synthesizes a distinctive feminist framework, privileging collaborative, participatory, and open-ended works encompassing the material, social, and cultural in the formation of an agential relational ethics. This well-researched visual and ethical analysis of the deeply integrated, tentacular nature of human thought couldn’t be more timely as we teeter on the precipice of AI, a technology that will inevitably shape thought and transform social relations.”
Christine Filippone, Professor of Art History, Millersville University of Pennsylvania, US
“Albu’s groundbreaking study of artistic uses of brain data suggests that attending to our bodies’ electric pulses opens new forms of interpersonal and inter-species understanding but also enables resistance to cognitive and corporate surveillance that shadow all forms of datafication.”
Kris Paulsen, Associate Professor of History of Art, Ohio State University, US, author of Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface
