Otro descubrimiento durante Ars Electronica fue esta instalación en la que pudimos escanear nuestro ojo con una máquina de estas que usan los oftalmólogos y contemplar su remezcla con los de otros visitantes en gran formato.

[photo documentation at flickr]

Ars Electronica 2008 : Der Gedankenprojektor
Landesgalerie Linz

Der Gedankenprojektor (Thought Projector) is based on Nikola Tesla´s technical utopia of a device to photographically depict thoughts.

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), “a forgotten genius of the science of electricity,” wanted to build a device that could be used to photograph thoughts. This possibility of an elaborately developed image transfer process ignited the interest of alien productions for a number of reasons—first of all, certain historical occurrences and phenomena. For instance, it’s said that the last image a decedent sees is stored in his/her eyes, which, in the case of violent death, could preserve the identity of the victim’s murderer. And then there’s the occult world’s aura photography that’s said to be able to physically manifest thoughts solely via concentration on light-sensitive paper and thus even without a camera.

A professional-grade ZEISS fundus camera as used by ophthalmologists provides high-resolution images of the visitors’ retina, the interior surface of the eye, and the iris. Visitor´s innermost thoughts – ideas that have materialized into images on their retinas – are projected onto the wall of the installation space as a sort of «thought frieze.»

At http://alien.mur.at/gedankenprojektor, you´ll find all the Internet streams, and you can use your Download Ticket to download the archived image of your own eye.

alien productions are Martin Breindl, Norbert Math, Andrea Sodomka, August Black

The Thought Projector was first produced at Künstlerhaus Graz (Werner Fenz, Evelyn Kraus) in September/October 2007.

Thoughts are read with a fundus camera manufactured by ZEISS
supported by ZEISS