Mason McClay: Disembodiment, Disassociation, and Paradoxes of Self Reference

We got inside the complex mind of Neuroscientist and Artist Mason McClay (@madqua.lia) and found a unique intersection between science and art. From free-associating words as a child, to deep meditation as a teen and studying Neuroscience as an adult, read on to discover how Mason’s visually and conceptually intriguing work came to be.

CA: How do you identify?

MM: I am a cognitive neuroscience/experimental psychologist, that’s my profession…What I’ve been studying at UT is how emotion affects memory.

CA: And as an artist?

MM: (Laughs) This is something I’ve been struggling with since college—how do I take something that I am passionate about and find the ground for that, and return to that ground as consistently as I can to keep me going. I love consciousness, I love the mind and I love writing about it and I don’t always like having to sit down and read over a hundred papers to come up with an experiment that will take me over a year to conduct. I also love art, and I love literature so the way I process... and get inspiration for myself is just by engaging in that in a more artistic way and in the last two years it’s come out as multi-media poetry.

Often times I think the best thinking can be done in that way, you can have major insights... about human relations, societal issues, even really intricate difficult factors implicated in consciousness without doing science or philosophy, and at the same time I think a lot of art is its own science and and philosophy. So I guess part of what I like to do is deconstruct these barriers across fields and mediums, at least in my own microcosm.

CA: Elaborate on the ramifications of these barriers

MM: I think there are major issues with academic culture that sort of weaponize those barriers. For example in cognitive neuroscience it’s really common for people to shut you down as soon as you invoke an analogy from literature, or a super related and potentially helpful concept from philosophy of mind. It’s more important to deconstruct those explicit barriers than it is to justify them—though some barriers can help induce creative thinking because it can give you a platform to understand how things that seem unrelated can relate.

I thought really hard for a half a year about quitting science and doing art full time because it was really difficult to go to work, do a bunch of analyses, collect a bunch of data, read a ton of technical papers, and then go home and try to write a poem. It felt like the way I engaged with the world had to change in order to do both things. 

So I made up my mind, “There’s no reason to have to quit one thing” and it sucks that any field is the way it is that it constrains people in such a way, and I make it part of my goal to help  to reduce those barriers. So I said “Okay I’m going to remain in science because I love it so much and I’m going to try and find as many possible ways to integrate art.” One of the things I started doing to play around with it, is I would take data from my studies and use that in art. I had an emotion study where people looked at negative images and had to basically describe the images in detail as a memory test—something called “a free recall test.” I took natural language processing algorithms and applied it to their memory data and got this really weird, sort of like negative emotional bot that describes horribles images and scenes from a database that’s been used for 40 years (laughs). 

CA: What artists/thinkers have informed your work?

MM: One person that was a big awakening for me three or four years ago, was French Chilean poet (he wasn’t really a poet), Eduardo Kac. He started his career by doing nonlinear poetry and developed a medium called Halo-Poetry, holographic poems. This is back in the 70’s...he created these holographic poems that you could walk around and the text would change based off your position. Then… he started doing something he called ‘Bio Art’ (which wasn’t really a thing at that time). He began by encoding a poem into a microchip and then injected that into his leg, and a couple years later he encoded poetry into DNA, had that put into a viral vector, and then injected the viral vector into a bacterial colony, and then had people mutate the bacteria by activating a UV light over the internet. (Starts to laugh) Once I heard about stuff like that, it’s like what the fuck? Fuck sitting at my desk trying to write some formally constructed thing.

After that I started diving into new media artists like Golan Levin at Carnegie Melon, who’s worked with sound poets before and created highly conceptualized projects using bots that scrape the internet for '“break up texts.” He called it “The Dumpster Bot”—just an archive of break up texts people sent to each other.

CA: When did you become interested in writing and consciousness?

MM: When I was in elementary school I would wake up in the middle of the night with long strewn out words and characters in my head, and write that down and honestly for a long time I kept that a little secret and would put it in the top drawer of my dresser.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do growing up. It wasn’t until middle or high school when I started doing drugs and was in this meditation cult where I had these profound altered states of consciousness on a regular basis, multiple times a month, going on retreats where you’d be meditating for hours on end. During that whole process I really became obsessed with what the fuck is consciousness? What is self identity? What does it mean when I experience my thoughts popping into mind… We don’t understand what the hell this is. So my intention all along is what are the futures of consciousness that allow us to function the way that we do... It took me a lot of deprogramming and de-conditioning since I left Cincinnati to get out of that. It took me a couple years to synthesize my identity and understand what I could take with me after being in a strict meditation cult that hyper regulated my behavior—a big part of that process was science and philosophy.

CA: What concepts are you intrigued by these days?

MM: For about a year now I’m been working with different features of embodiment and disembodiment, disassociation, paradoxes of self reference, or what they would say in psychological literature is “the distinction between self-related processing and non-self-relating processing.” It was jolted into my awareness after reading 20th-century Phenomenology including people like Merleau-Ponty, and Golan Levin. Levin has a concept called ‘Substitution.’ It’s this ideas that when you experience another person you have this reciprocal switching of reference. When I talk to, or look at you according to Levin, the only way that I can interact with you is if I somehow understand your own mental state or have this radical empathy. Essentially what I’m doing is I’m replacing myself with you, by entering your perspective, and according to phenomenologists this happens constantly, right away, outside of our awareness, it’s this liminal state we're always in, this state of alterity and otherness. That got me thinking, how do we talk about embodiment, or these states where people really suffer because there’s a lack of embodiment like in bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depersonalization disorder—how do we approach these experiences people have? 

There’s also an inverse problem where people in meditation or crises see themself as a subject or an object among other subjects and objects. Dissociating yourself by recognizing that there are millions and billions of others with the same moral values as you. It’s not necessarily a bad thing it can be a helpful and inspiring thing that expands your capacity to act in altruistic ways or expand what matters in your day-to-day thinking. For some people it helps them and adds value to their experience. And then other people just the thought of that totally dissociates their identity, and it could be a fatal thing, induce a whole episode of dissociation. 

CA: Talk about your recent video-based poetry work.

MM: Lately I’ve been trying to create patterns, leveraging hidden geometry in the animation. I have a few coming out in an Australian journal called Otoliths. Those are the first ones where the animated poetry changes it’s shape because it’s bumping into another shape, so it creates a new shape out of a hidden figure.  I’m trying to use those hidden figures to explore non-linear poetry but also again this ‘self-other’ distinction and this new identity we create at the boundary of ourselves and others. 

I use Node Box, an open source software, anyone can download it and it’s totally free. Typically I export the animations and manipulate them in Touch Designer. I did a piece at our Hello Neighbor show (by Verv Collective), it was a direct generative poetry thing, where people typed in a memory and the memory was analyzed based off of sentiment and then put into a structure on Touch Designer. 

Most of the ones I’ve done are fully written by me, although more recently the ones I’ve made are collaborations with A.I (artificial intelligence).  

CA: What’s your perspective on Open Source and the internet as a gallery?

MM: Giving people the access to see what other people are thinking about… is the entire ethos of having a community—in art, science or any field. 

CA: Advice for those who want to become more involved in interdisciplinary arts?

MM: …This comes from a really deep personal place for me—feeling totally isolated, feeling like all my work deserves to be shut up in a room somewhere no one would be able to see or care about—There are people everywhere, all around the world that can be accessed, that are doing something along the lines of what you’re thinking about, and that will encourage and support your work. I think we have some communities in Austin that are filled with people like that. Collectives like Chicon Street Poets and Verv are filled with people like that. I know that there are a billion other collectives in the city that likely have the same ethos… like Future TBD.

CA: Do you have any utopia projects on your horizon?

MM: Creating some sort of atmosphere where people could navigate different experiences of others and feel the actual content along several different sensory modalities. So not just sight or sound but also tactile stimulation or smell. There’s this whole navigation—a map of features of consciousness that could be explored in a virtual environment. That’s something I’d love to start exploring. Maybe in a year or two (laughs). I also have a bunch of book ideas that I’ll eventually get to. Creating books is a lot of time and effort that I haven’t been able to allocate yet.

CA: That’s a wild concept

There are examples of poets that have done crazy almost trans-media work. Raul Zurita had planes fly over New York and write poetry in the sky in Spanish, speaking to the Latinx populations. The poem was about isolation and transcending boundaries. He quickly followed that up with writing a poem in the Chilean desert. He bulldozed it into a cliff face, it was like, a 2 mile-long poem that he just bulldozed into the desert.

CA: He rode it with a bulldozer?

MM: He ‘wrote’ it (laughs), with a bulldozer.

To follow Mason’s writing or ride onto artificial planes of consciousness follow his work at @madqua.lia or on his website: www.mas----clay.com