The Human Thinking Machine

There is a moment, before every thought, when the brain is already at work but has nothing to say yet. No words, no intentions, no form. Only activity. The Human Thinking Machine comes from the wish to gather the traces of that moment.

A machine that is not artificial intelligence

Today the phrase "thinking machine" almost always points to AI. The title goes the other way: the thinking machine I mean is the human brain. After many years as an engineer in the world of IT, I am interested in the oldest and most complex machine we know, the one each of us carries.

The first traces

My work has always started from the automatic sketch, the mark that arises in daily interaction with the world, before any plan. In The Human Thinking Machine these sketches stay raw. I don't transform them into chromatic fields, as in Visions: I let them speak in their original form.

I call them "first traces" in two senses. They come first in time, because they arrive before conscious thought. And they are primary, because they stay as close as possible to the source. They are what the brain leaves on paper before it becomes mind.

Why layer them

The brain doesn't work one thought at a time. Many activities run in parallel, intertwine, cover one another. A single sketch would be a simplification. That is why I layer them, without hierarchy: some in the foreground, others fading into the background like thoughts already gone.

From this tangle a mechanism emerges, not yet assembled: gears, teeth, arcs that keep returning. A complex structure in formation, seeking space and rhythm.

Colour: space and warmth

Two colour interventions accompany the mark. The first is the inlays, clean fields that open the voids in which the machine will be able to move and give the composition its movement. The second is less visible but, for me, essential. The sketches are drawn in blue pen on white paper, and a gradient map turns them into warm tones. It is a technical process, yet its effect is to give back to the mark the temperature of the human gesture. Here, the machine returns warmth to the hand.

A thought not yet complete

These works don't show a finished thought. They show the moment in which thought begins to organise itself. That is why their meaning is not fixed: as I wrote in Meaning as Event, it happens in the encounter with the viewer. Standing before these gears, each person will see something different take shape.

The Human Thinking Machine is an open project. The first two works, N.1 and N.2, are the beginning.