Excavating Rhythms: The Brain as a Drawing Tool | Florence, Italy | Unit 21 | 2023

Excavating Rhythms is a case study for the use of the brain as a drawing tool. Using a digital drawing machine created in term 1, which takes brain wave data in real time and uses them to record and generate line drawings, this project explores the ways in which these drawings can create a new language for redesigning a landscape at all scales.

The site being the archaeological area of Fiesole, Tuscany, connecting to the history and what has previously happened there is a key part of the project. The idea of the ‘brain machine’ is to visualise what we can’t see. To bring to life, in the form of a series of drawings, our reactions, emotions and connections to different external stimuli. Using this narrative, the use of historical stimuli that is connected to the site, can allow us to encode a human experience, memory and reaction into an important physical space. While listening to excerpts from tragedies and plays performed on the site over 2000 years ago, drawings are created that visualise our interactions with the unseen elements of the site. By creating a series of line drawings that record the rhythms of the mind whilst interacting with this ancient media, we can encode these rhythms into the site itself. The site being an archaeological one, is to remain as such, honoured and preserved. For this reason, the programme respects the history and only enhances what remains. The design, from the remapping of the landscape, and all the way to the smallest details, uses the drawings as a guiding tool and allows for a design language to evolve out of these generated rhythms.

The project aims to celebrate the history of a place whilst staying true to the behaviour of a true archaeological site. Like a 2000-piece puzzle of fragments and memories that tell the story of the past, this project seeks to use the hidden parts of the story to create a new picture.

Excavating Rhythms: The Brain as a Drawing Tool, Final Film

Master Plan, 1:250

The Brain Machine: A series of tests that aim to provoke a reaction from the brain to generate drawings that show the rhythms of the mind in real time.

Created using TouchDesigner.

Using the Machine: The process of using the brain machine to generate drawings using historical media from the site. These drawings were then used to redesign the entire landscape and the buildings themselves.

Roof Process Animation: Designing the roof using the generated drawings and the rhythm they create.

Roof Plan: Generating the Roof