DATA SHEET
Title / Título:
1Stein
Team members / Miembros del equipo:
Jan de Wit (NL) engineer / ingeniero; Frouke ten Velden (NL) artist / artista; Lisa Derksen Castillo (NL, ES) artist / artista; Suzanne van Dongen (NL) artist / artista
Scientist / Científico:
Santiago Rocha Romero (ES) Neurosurgeon / Neurocirujano
Virgen del Rocío Hospital, Seville (Andalusian Health Service, SNS) / Virgen del Rocío – Virgen Macarena, Sevilla (Servicio Andaluz de Salud, SNS)
Seed / Semilla:
“The essence of being” / “La esencia del ser”
Technique / Técnica:
Installation, interactive installation / Instalación interactiva. Técnica mixta
Dimensions / Dimensiones:
80 x 50 x 30 cm
SEED
Phineas Gage, a kind and responsible 25-year-old, survived a severe 1848 accident where a metal rod pierced his skull, damaging his frontal lobe. Though his memory and strength remained intact, his personality changed drastically—he became rude, impulsive, and unreliable. This transformation revealed, for the first time, the critical role of the frontal lobes in personality, behavior, and emotions, changing neuroscience’s understanding of the brain.
THE VISION OF THE CREATORS OF THE WORK
In our work, we explore the fragility of identity through an interactive installation that examines the relationship between the physical brain and our thoughts and behavior. We experience our personality as who we are and what defines us. However, what we often see as fixed—our personality, becomes something very fragile when the physical brain is damaged. To explore this, we developed Stein—a computer we built ourselves, equipped with the key traits of the human brain. Visitors are invited to physically pull cables from this ‘brain’—a direct intervention that severs neural-like connections and alters Stein’s behavior and functions in real time.
When a cable is pulled, the effect is immediate. Stein may lose his train of thought, forget what he was saying, or suddenly shift emotional tone. He might become confused, repetitive, or contradict himself—mirroring the effects of disrupted neural pathways in the human brain. Some disconnections impair memory; others interfere with mood, reasoning, or language.
Stein is caught in a philosophical inquiry: What defines who I am? Yet his search for identity is constantly interrupted, reshaped, and influenced by external interference. As connections are broken, his behavior changes. His thoughts, feelings, and sense of self are rewritten through the manipulation of his neural architecture. We designed Stein in a retro-tech engineering style that visualizes, in real time, which brain regions are active and which have become inactive.
We invite visitors to question their sense of self and its origins. Are we born with a fixed set of personality traits? Or do we grow into them over time? And how easily can we lose them? In the end, what makes you you? This installation encourages visitors to actively participate in the dismantling of an identity, revealing just how vulnerable the self truly is.
CURATOR'S VISION OF THE WORK
This SciArt work invites audiences into an uncanny encounter: a holographic brain, suspended in space, capable of interaction through an AI interface. Yet unlike typical systems of rational clarity, this brain responds unevenly, only certain regions “activate” at a time, echoing the neurological disruptions seen in the case of Phineas Gage. His accident, which altered his personality due to frontal lobe damage, serves as a haunting reminder: what we perceive as “self” may rest on unstable ground.
The installation interrogates the boundaries between identity, mind, and matter. It raises crucial questions about agency in an age where cognition can be simulated and dissected. It destabilizes the comforting notion of a unified self. Visitors may ask: Am I a sum of neurons? A continuity of memory? A fragile pattern of behavior that could, at any moment, shift?
Through immersive interaction, “1Stein” becomes both mirror and mystery, inviting us to ask not just how the brain works, but what makes us work, and how easily that coherence can slip away.
Con la colaboración de la Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología – Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades @fecyt_ciencia
