Marcos Lutyens is a british contemporary artist settled in Los Angeles. His research is based on consciousness and social dynamics; he has worked on large-scale projects that involve interactivity, the environment and new technologies. These interest led him to exhibit all over the world including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2013), Documenta 13 in Kassel, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2012), Centre Pompidou in Paris (2010), Royal Academy of Arts, London (2009).

Now he presents Social pharmakon at Arte Boccanera Gallery in Trento. This body of work is based on research to do with inter-personal group communication on the internet and is a further development of Lutyens’ interest in our social interactions, as new technologies change the way we are. In this interview we try to understand his personal ideas about the social issues he evaluates, what lead him to this cultural field of research, and, at last but not least to capture his unconscious way to create his masterpieces.

*Your work takes account of many diffrent social issues: your interests range from senses and perception to awareness and the subconscious. Which are your theoretical references? Are there any authors in your education that led you on this kind of research?
*I like to feed off tangential ideas and lines of inquiry that may inform certain new aspects of how the mind behaves. For instance, in the case of Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, in which the idea of cellular automata is explored, I used this underlying pattern of encoded mathematical behavior to explore the mind through a repeated hypnosis induction which involved the same cellular automata-like instruction over and over again, and through repeated experiments involving hypnosis, I built up a mapping of the unconscious mind. Other influences have included Professor Vilayanur Ramachandran and his study of synesthesia and phantom limbs, Dr. Manfred Clynes and his exploration of the link between touch and emotions which he called Sentic, and Chimeras and Consciousness: Evolution of the Sensory Self, by Dorion Sagan. But principally my research has been in the field, such as through working with synesthetic communities, scientific collaborations with environmentalists, neuroscientists, synthetic biologists, etc., and shamanic traditions such as the Huichol peoples of Mexico.

In your opinion, which are the positive and the negative implications of scientific and technological research in the perception field? These developments are unstoppable, and whether positive or negative, are part of today's zeitgeist. As our nervous system is extended by ever more powerful tele-scopes, micro-scopes and hundreds of other sensing apparatus which we add to our external perceptual array, we are also learning so much inwardly through brain scanning advances and other types of 'eso-scopes'. One of the more positive applications of research into the brain and sensing has been to enable people with disabilities to be able to feel, see or touch again, sometimes through sensory substitution, i.e. sensing vision through touch for instance, and at other times through rewiring neural circuits. Of course, a lot of technologies originate through the military, such as seeing around walls or invisible cloaks. In the end, it is how the research is applied more than what it actually is. As a general rule, I would say that anything that sensitizes us more to the environment and society around us, by increasing our awareness and connecting our internal self to these external worlds, can only lead to more a positive outcome. I wish that every time a tree was felled in the amazon we would feel a twinge: it's just a step away.

Even in Pharmacon, the relation between advantages and disadvantages, between "cure and poison", seems to be present in your content. Do you think this contrast is a necessary condition of being?
It is impossible to take a purely objective position in the world of social media, an environment in which most of us are immersed. To think of whether this socio-electronic world is positive or negative involves taking a moral stance. As an artist I try to reflect the flows and interchanges that I observe, as simply as holding up a mirror to reflect the undercurrents of what is happening. Some people see a cure where other people are convinced there is a poison, but there is no doubt that often a technology or device that was intended to help us, becomes a crutch that ends up crippling us. For instance, social media was designed to extend our ability to have friends and in the end it has created a world of mass isolation.

*In other works you investigate senses such as sight and touch. In Pharmacon you have explored the olfactory sense. The link between this sense and the subconscious maybe more direct: afterall, it is the sense where the most remote memories are allocated. Is it possible to link conceptually that with the idea of social networks because of its passivity? On the other hand, it’s the only sense with the taste which is not involved in the socials’ multimedia interaction…
*In the hypnotic induction called Electronic Ether that I created for the exhibit, I invited the visitors to shift their attention first to the sense of touch and then to the sense of smell, prompting different neural pathways when considering social media networks. I wanted to divert attention away from the flat-screen senses of sound and sight that are all we have through our present computer interfaces, and re-engage in a different way. In social media such as Facebook, because we are mostly connecting through sight and reactive thought, we do not generally feel empathy as our own memories and deeper emotions are not engaged. However, through smell and touch we often achieve a much more visceral correspondence to the world around us. Smell is of particular interest as it is the only primary sense that does not cross over in the brain. The left nostril is connected to the left brain and the right nostril to the right brain, underscoring the fact that smell is the most direct sense, perhaps other than propioception or balance. Smell as Marcel Proust and others have noted is the key to unlocking our innermost memories: connecting it to social media seems like a natural progression of these investigations through olfactory poesis.

*With your Psycographies you show the abstract forms that your brain elaborates after receiving metadata.You actually make brain’s process material and give form to feelings and thoughts. You combine two opposed and simultaneous socio-anthropological issues: the reduction of awareness by social media's protocol and the diametrically opposed research of inner being through psychoanalysis or some trascendental meditation as yoga…
*The two opposing tendencies create a field of turbulence like the nodes generated when two oceans collide. But it is not for my conscious mind to make judgements: I am skeptical that the conscious mind can make useful value judgements whether making artworks or merely observing one's relationship to the world and in this case to social media. This is why I have devised an automatic process in which my unconscious mind sends signals to create the artwork directly, unhindered by the lenses of distortion such as ego, prejudice and strategic thinking that the conscious mind invariably brings to bear. In general though, as I have immersed myself progressively deeper into this project, I feel that my engagement through focused unconscious processes related to hypnotic trance have won out over the flitting attention of every day usage of social media, connecting me at deeper levels to my 'electronic ether' friends near and far.

Text by Giulia Palomba