Reified Absence

Sep 2023 - Posted in Works by

3D Printed sculptures,

Exhibition: Cerveau Machine, Le Cube Garges, 12 Sept. – 27 Dec. 2023

 

Architecture and engineering: Eleanor Mila-Soline

Curatorial Team: Le Cube Garges, France

Values are chosen, embraced, and woven into the self. Yet what one subject holds close, another may refuse. Reified Absence gives form to this divergence.

Within a cubic Cartesian model, the negative space of an immaterial ethical asset is extracted and materialized through 3D printing. What was once intangible becomes physical, visible, exchangeable. Yet the value itself appears not as presence, but as void: a form revealed through what is missing.

Here, absence becomes the means of inscription. The invisible takes shape as a gap, a hollow, a contour of belief and refusal.

Reified* Absence is an extension of Value of Values. Human values are neurodesigned, crypto minted, bartered or traded. They are then converted, by the Brain Workers or by their owner, into printed Twodees, or Neuro-Calligraphy, 3D printed sculptures as Threedees, generated Transactional Poetry, or money. 

*The reification process is inspired by Karl Marx, Georg Lukács and Guy Debord. Reified Absence is part of the Brain Factory project initiated in 2015 by Maurice Benayoun.

Value of Values

Situated between art and neuroscience, Value of Values (VOV.ART) asks how something inherently formless, human abstraction, might be made visible. Values such as LOVE, POWER, MONEY, COMPASSION, or INTELLIGENCE do not exist as objects in the world, yet they shape perception, feeling, judgment, and action. Invisible yet operative, they structure how we inhabit reality.

Using electroencephalography (EEG), Value of Values translates these internal constructs into shifting visual forms. Participants wear an EEG headset and are invited to focus on one of 42 values embedded in the system. As they think of FREEDOM, LOVE, or POWER, their brain activity is converted into an evolving digital morphology.

What emerges is not an illustration of a value, but its temporary appearance: a singular, unstable form produced at the intersection of thought, emotion, and individual experience. Each image differs from one participant to the next, forming a living archive of subjective value.

These neural forms are then translated into 3D models and inscribed on the blockchain as NFTs. In this move, immaterial values enter circuits of exchange, ownership, and speculation. Ethical and emotional investments become tradable assets; symbolic language extends into Transactional Poetry; inner life is projected into market logic.

As “Brain Workers,” participants become both producers and owners of the crypto-assets they generate. They may collect, exchange, or sell them, revealing the shifting and comparative value of values across individuals, cities, and cultures.