Portrait of Cynthia O'Neill
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Cynthia O'Neill

About the Artist

Cynthia O’Neill (1990) is a Baltimore based interdisciplinary artist who uses art as a method of healing, communicating and narrating personal journey. Illness and art have been constants in her life; survival and medical conditions often force her to consider anatomy when investigating how humans exist within the world.  Through sculptures, body adornments, and installations her work explores consciousness, perception and the biology of the human condition with a variety of technology, biofeedback, human-made and naturally occurring materials. O’Neill scales her work to a relationship with the physical anatomical form. Themes of meditation, medicine, anatomy, conflict, and sexuality in relationship to the body are recurrent throughout her practice. O’Neill is a second year graduate student at  the Rinehart School of Sculpture.  

Cynthia O'Neill website View Website

Featured Work

Photos

Female form, full body cast, suspended 25ft in the air with a ball that swings just a few inches from the ground as a counterweight.
If we all bleed the same why do we rip each other apart.
These pieces were found while I was out on hikes, I would go on moving meditations while on an artist residency in Vermont in the mountains and complete these drawings during a meditative sessions. I wore an EEG scanner during these sessions to monitor frontal lobe activity and recorded the results. These scans would appear in later work.
Opia: A combining form occurring in compound words denoting a condition of sight or of the visual organs. Mandala: At it’s basic level is designed to exhibit radial balance and generally four large gates of focus each in opposite direction to equal a square. A mandala is an aid to meditation. The person engaged is contemplating something fully until saturation. It is a spiritual guide and way to understanding.
How much can we change in our reality if we simply choose to set our mind to it? Visualizing Consciousness: the power of mental choice and focus through EEG and Brain Controlled Interfacing Technology is an interactive exploration of the use of electrical activity in the brain during meditative and focused sessions to move a reactive drawing machine. Use of an Electroencephalogram (EEG) machine is a non-invasive approach of observing how brain cells communicate with one another. Harnessing these data, we can begin to think about ways of accessing and interacting with our mind’s energy.

Videos

  • Visualizing Consciousness: Drawing Machine

    See more information about Visualizing Consciousness: Drawing Machine
    An EEG Responsive Drawing Machine. This small drawing machine on the white platform is being controlled by the model who is wearing an EEG Headset. The headset communicates to a series of programs that tells the machine what to do it. Utilizing mind power to make something move!
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    How much can we change in our reality if we simply choose to set our mind to it? Visualizing Consciousness: the power of mental choice and focus through EEG and Brain Controlled Interfacing Technology is an interactive exploration of the use of electrical activity in the brain during meditative and focused sessions to move a reactive drawing machine. Use of an Electroencephalogram (EEG) machine is a non-invasive approach of observing how brain cells communicate with one another. Harnessing these data, we can begin to think about ways of accessing and interacting with our mind’s energy.
    Medium: EEG Scanner, Arduino, Python Program, Robotics, Drawing Tools
    Year: 2018
    Details: 30 Seconds, Dimensions Vary