Second Brain is is an artificial life project that embodies the very essence of living systems—behavior, adaptability, and emotional expression—through the medium of light. The lamp operates as a dynamic, evolving entity, driven by advanced AI, and interacts autonomously with its environment to reflect and express complex emotional states. Just like a living organism, it learns, adapts, and evolves, responding to stimuli with unpredictable behaviors.
It is an emotional machine that expresses the meaning of emotional experience rather than physical reality, through the modulation of different colors, revealing its moods, temperament and personality. The deep relationship between emotions and thoughts, is expressed through complex and chaotic behavioural patterns.
Is free will an illusion and human action dependent on consequences of previous actions? This radical behaviourism position has been overtaken later by the cognitive revolution and the postcognitivist thinking. Now, with the fast growth of big behavioral data and applications, applied behavior analysis becomes increasingly critical for in-depth understanding of what, why and how behaviors are formed, change and affect decision. This process of the capture of life into data, the quantification of life, produces overload distortion and quantization errors that accumulate, and may not at all reflect what is really going on at the level of micro-processes.
In humans, the decisions occur in the brain but also in the belly, that is composed in small part of human cells and for the most from the ecological community of commensal, symbiotic and pathogenic microorganisms that literally share our body space. Technically known as the enteric nervous system, the “second brain” consists of sheaths of neurons embedded in the walls of our gut and contains some 100 million neurons, more than in either the spinal cord or the peripheral nervous system: a big part of our emotions are influenced by the nerves in our gut. The enteric nervous system uses more than 30 neurotransmitters, just like the brain, and in fact 95 percent of the body’s serotonin is found in the bowels. It maintains close links with, and is influenced by, the microbiome, an extensive universe of symbiotic bacteria in the gut that play a vital role in immune health, brain function, and signaling systems within the central nervous system. The same Big data techniques that makes applied behavior analysis possible allows the analysis of massive metagenomics databases making this information accessible to researchers across multiple discipline. Because of its ability to reveal the previously hidden diversity of microscopic life, metagenomics offers a powerful lens for viewing the microbial world that has the potential to revolutionize understanding of the entire living world.
This project was presented in the exhibition Every Single Thing That Exists in the Infinite Universe Is Either a Duck or no Duck, about the worldly multi-species communities and their entanglement.
Galerie im Körnerpark, Berlin, 19.10.2024 – 26.02.2025 Curated by Dr. Karolina Wlazto-Malinowska
In our daily hustle, we often overlook our reliance on the environment. Enclosed within the human-made places, we forget the bonds with the land. Since the agrarian revolutions, humanity has gradually gained a sense of dominance over the ecosystem, relegating the environment to mere background noise.
At the same time, our exploitative relationship with the land and its inhabitants has reached various thresholds of environmental resilience, resulting in unprecedented degradation. This exposes not only the fragility of ecosystems but also our own vulnerability.
In the midst of the unfolding eco-social crisis, many of us are thus looking into alternative modes of self-organisation that would recognise interconnectivity and interdependencies humans form with and within the global ecosystems, emphasising a perspective of care.
The exhibition forms a multi-layered narrative, offering the audience various points of entry into the realm of human and other-than-human interactions. It presents life as an entanglement of possibilities and unexpected perspectives. Through interdisciplinary dialogue, it reveals a multi-faceted reality of relations, moving beyond the dualistic divides. It adopts a position of looking inward, outwards, and around to create the subjectivity of the environment.