“Mindcasting” featured in the New York Times (sort of)
What happens when you stick an artist inside an fMRI machine? Fifteen years ago I wrote “Mindcasting” for AIGA’s “Design Envy” blog—an article about broadcasting both real and imagined images. Today the New York Times finally caught up.
In the autumn of 2011, I was invited to guest post for a week on AIGA’s now-defunct “Design Envy” blog. I closed out the week on Friday, November 11th with what I thought was a banger: A short article on how the ability to read and broadcast visual thoughts was not only inevitable, it would favor skilled typographers. (I still believe in the premise, but also admit I thought this would be catnip to an audience of typography-loving graphic designers.) And now, exactly fifteen years and one day later, the New York Times has published an opinion piece by artist Trevor Paglen titled “I Saw the Future of Mind-Reading”—or as it appears on the article’s dedicated page: “When Your Inner Thoughts Are No Longer Just Yours.”
I didn’t just love and leave this idea back in 2011. I held it close. Near the end of 2017 I filed a provisional patent for “fMRI authoring”—a means of rapidly prototyping three-dimensional objects and environments just by imagining them. I’d been deeply immersed in the field of extended reality and understood what a pain point 3D authoring is. It’s time consuming. It’s expensive. And it’s difficult to iterate on. If only you could create through the act of imagination itself! That was the big idea. I even got in touch with Dr. Jack Gallant (mentioned in both my article and Trevor’s) and we met in person at Unity’s San Francisco office to discuss potential collaborations. At that point I was working for Unity’s Labs division and taking big swings at inventing the future. (And I was obsessed with the idea of sticking my friend Teek Mach inside an fMRI to see what images her enormously talented illustrator mind could imagine!)
More recently, the ideas I’d written about became central to a personal project I’ve been working on in my spare time for the past few years. That one I can’t elaborate on yet—but you’ll know it when you see it.
So where does this all leave us? I’m going to keep on imagining the future and talking about it. Something that’s captured my imagination for the past several years is quantum computing. That curiosity led me to create Quantum JavaScript, serve as an Artist in Residence at Yale University’s Quantum Institute, and join Moth as the company’s Quantum Evangelist. Keep an eye out. We’re going to make our own headlines.