Neural Ipsum ()
Devon Ward
(industrially printed book)
70mm x 150mm x 8mm
Neural Ipsum is an industrially printed book that explores the relationship between data and the brain, inviting speculation about the limits of human knowledge production through data collection. Contemporary biotechnologies collect data from the brain at unprecedented levels, offering the ability to record communications between individual neurons.
Neural Ipsum is a Sisyphean print, an absurd record of an opaque code. These pages contain neuronal data—collected from rat neurons during a 20 minute experiment—that has been translated into Lorem Ipsum, a collection of latinate phrases strung together with spaces, paragraphs and punctuation marks. Ipsum is a pretense, merely giving the appearance of readable text. Each phrase, period, comma and paragraph-break corresponds to an action potential sent between neurons. The structural form of this book takes its cues from the neuronal activity documented within these pages and yet the data remains opaque.