Liquid Perceptron
Computer-video installation, 2002

The brain is a network that consists of 10 billion neurons. On the one hand, it works as a stimulator and, on the other hand, as a simulator. Neurons can be excited through external stimuli and thereby led to an oscillatory state. Via axons and synaptic connections these stimuli are transmitted to adjacent neurons. This leads to a global pattern formation of brain activity.
The brain remains in activity even if there is no external stimulus, which means that it simulates, for example, when we are dreaming. However the stimulator and simulator cannot be strictly treated separately. One may think of the famous deprivation tank experiments where the test persons who are fully de-coupled from external stimuli very quickly start to hallucinate.
The installation "Liquid Perceptron" is a simulation of a neuronal network that is excitable through the external reality. The open loop state of the brain shows wave-like fluid patterns. After the network has been coupled to the external world an image of the reality becomes emergent - superimposed by the "self dynamics" of the Liquid Perceptron.

It has first been recognized by Alan Turing that small local instabilities, perturbations or excitations, respectively, within a part of a multi-component coupled system lead to a spread of coherent global patterns throughout the total system. In his very important paper on the chemical bases of morphogenesis in 1954 he already addressed the still open question where the information is located that tells the ovum where the head and the feet, respectively, of an embryo have to be placed.

Compared with morphogenesis, the time scale of the pattern forming processes in the brain is much smaller and, additionally, these processes are only temporarily stable. The brain is almost always in a transient state. Nevertheless, from a dynamical point of view morphogenetic systems and brains can be regarded as closely related.