Brain Cell is a mail art project begun by Ryosuke Cohen in June 1985. The project is basically a networked art project where individual artists create their own 30x42cm work of art with stamps, drawings, stickers and so forth. This is sent to Cohen, who prints each cell - 150 copies each - with a Cyclostyle (now out of production). One copy is sent to the author, as well as to the other participants. New editions are published every 8 to 10 days. As of January 2012, there have been 813 issues.
Cohen described the origin of the project's name in 1985:
"Well, I’ll title my work “Brain Cell”, because the structure of a brain through a microscope looks like the diagram of the Mail Art network. Thousands of Neurons clung and piled up together are just like the Mail Art network, I believe."
Brain Cell is an art experiment in the vein of networked mail art, where a network expands from A, copied, forwarded and even returned to the originator. This produces a series of cybernetic cells, which can interact in a non-linear order. Brain Cell has enlisted over 6,000 contributors from 80 nations since 1985.
Famous quotes containing the words brain and/or cell:
“They tend to be suspicious, bristly, paranoid-type people with huge egos they push around like some elephantiasis victim with his distended testicles in a wheelbarrow terrified no doubt that some skulking ingrate of a clone student will sneak into his very brain and steal his genius work.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)