I'm sitting in artist Ion Popian's light-filled Long Island City, N.Y., studio. A NeuroSky electroencephalogram (EEG) sensor presses against my temple and forehead. I watch a TV screen, where abstract shapes flit and mutate in crisp 4K resolution.

Behind me, a computer measures my brain activity, mapping it as a 3D model. This model initially looks like a piece of paper, a flat plane. When my brainwaves register concentration in response to the film, a dimple appears in the plane; when they register calm, the surface pushes upward into a peak.

"We can't map specific emotions: anger or sadness or happiness," Popian explains. "Instead, we're mapping intensities."

This exercise is the first phase in Popian's Mental Fabrications, an art project that turns these brain maps into three-dimensional objects. Editing the map in a 3D modeling program, Popian and programmer Thomas Martinez convert the raw data into a smooth, undulating landscape that is then 3D-printed — creating, essentially, a tangible model of your mind you could theoretically display in your apartment.

Image: I.ONarch Design

Popian debuted the concept at SoHo's HarvestWorks gallery. There he showed the film, produced by filmmaker Noah Schulman, to wired-up attendees. The results were projected on a gallery wall. There's something strangely intimate about watching a stranger's brainwaves spike and dip with every passing thought, and yet, as Popian points out, it's not really voyeurism — the thoughts themselves are still inscrutable.

"The exhibit becomes a symbiotic relationship between the person who comes to the exhibit who creates the artwork" — the brain scans themselves — "and me, creating the system by which they can do that," he says.

As the next phase in the project, Popian plans to turn those models into something still more three-dimensional, by morphing them into free-standing figures rather than rolling planes. One such sculpture, on view at the HarvestWorks exhibit, is a curvaceous mass that turns in on itself, almost reflectively, like an abstracted version of Rodin's "The Thinker."

Image: I.ONarch Design

Popian's background is architecture, and while he approaches Mental Fabrications as art, he sees the tech behind it as having far-reaching applications for his trade. He's even transformed the mental maps into architectural renderings, as a conceptual exercise.

In architecture, emotion doesn't typically factor into how a structure is designed, he says. And yet, "architecture has a visual impact on whoever occupies it, which produces emotion." EEG technology could therefore affect how buildings are designed in the future, he says. "If we start mapping out the subconscious relationships of people while they experience a space — for example, an airport or a hospital — we can start designing architecture that is responsive to them."

Of course, the tech needs to evolve first. The sort of basic EEG mapping the NeuroSky performs is mostly used for gaming, and by the occasional Quantified Self enthusiast.

As data, these sculptures don't say much. Sometimes your brain radiates calm, sometimes concentration. Popian theorizes concentration spikes when your conscious mind is active, while meditation takes over when you recede into your subconscious. But as an art project, it doesn't much matter. The data doesn't need to work hard to be impressive. Mental Fabrications reminds us that even cold, hard data can be sacred and moving.

Image: I.ONarch Design

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