A Million Keys

Udo Wid- A Synergy of Disciplines, BrainPrints (1999)

Austrian biophysician and artist Udo Wid produced this project in 1999 at Secession in Vienna. Visitors to the gallery were invited to have their brain waves scanned and mathematically interpreted as a diagram. Wid, drawing from his scientific research, was then able to take this information and associate it with distinct personality traits, creating a “portrait” for each participant. BrainPrints comes out of Wid’s larger scientific and philosophical position of a Synergy of Disciplines, which argues that cultural structures are rooted in the brain’s reaction to its physical and physiological reality. Wid is especially interested in the effects of extremely low frequencies or ELF within this framework. ELF fields partially overlap with the frequency of the central nervous system, and therefore, ELF can potentially have an effect on the brain and, thus, cultural production. Since 2001, he set up a permanent ELF Observatory in northern Lower Austria to measure and study these frequencies.