THINK TANK
Think Tank, an
installation, employs 8 life-sized models of
human brains suspended in a clear medium in 2 1/2-gallon glass jars each connected by
tubes and wires to a
central control apparatus.
When
the term think tank first came into English usage, it referred to military
advisory organizations, such as the RAND Corporation (Research and
Development),
formed as an offshoot of Douglas Aircraft in 1946.
The first think
tanks, generally with large research budgets and staffs, offered the United
States government non-partisan military and policy advice. After 1970 an
explosion of much smaller, ideologically driven think tanks began to focus
exclusively on influencing both specific government policy and partisan
politics for specific interests.
Contemporary
think tanks represent a variety
of ideological views but since all are privately funded, their critics have
suggested they publish only those findings that ensure the continued flow of
funding. Think tanks that are funded by the energy industry, forinstance,
may ignore well-documented evidence of climate change, muddying the
scientific debate and perhaps
impeding a solution to what many consider a global catastrophe.
Think
Tank employs eight life-sized models of human brains suspended in water in
glass jars. Each brain is connected by tubes and wires to a
central control apparatus, much as members
of think tanks are managed by their employers.
The image of the
human brain in a jar may have entered western iconography in Renaissance
European cabinets of curiosity, encyclopedic collections of odd objects
gathered by popes, princes and scholars. Organic oddities floating in jars
of liquid later became standards of carnival and circus side shows and
museums of the macabre and unusual.
The first visual
reference to a brain in a jar I remember seeing was in James Whale’s 1933
film Frankenstein, in which the Doctor sends his assistant to his old
medical school to steal a brain. The image itself had experienced a
profound revolution, going from a curiosity on a seldom-seen dusty shelf to
a prop in moving pictures projected on screens for millions of people around
the world to see. It had also gained self-awareness—knew that it was
helplessly trapped in a glass jar and being kept alive by a mad scientist
hoping to communicate with it telepathically and harness its (inexplicable)
extrasensory powers for his own often evil ends. It played to two of the
deepest and most terrifying fears we share as a species—inescapable
confinement and the utter loss of control.
