Art, Brains & Data

Eric Drass aka shardcore discusses his collaboration with data from the human connectome project and elsewhere.

What is a brain anyway? How can science peer inside your skull? What’s the relationship between the map and the territory?

Artist Eric Drass shares his journey of turning a dataset of 100,000 brain fibres into art for CUBRIC (Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre).

Eric Drass is an artist making work in a range of media, from painting, to music, to machine-learning AI art. Some of his favourite themes are identity, consciousness, the philosophical ramifications of artificial intelligence, big data and the relationship between humans and machines. Sometimes this work is political, frequently it is playful, often it is provocative or transgressive in some way. His works are frequently reported and cited online (The Guardian, BBC, Wikipedia etc.)

Eric holds a degree in Philosophy and Psychology (Oxford) and an unfinished PhD in Cognitive Psycholinguistics (also Oxford). He is co-author on a number of technology patents, and academic papers relating to neural network models of language acquisition and heritability.

He also used to be a singer in an experimental hardcore band, an unsuccessful male model, and once took a dotcom company to 14 countries and back, spending $50m on the way. A long time ago he was a TV star in America, but he doesn’t like to talk about it.