Brain Cell

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This article is about the Ryosuke Cohen mail art project. For neurobiological brain cells, see Brain cell.

'Brain Cell' is a mail art project begun by Ryosuke Cohen in June 1985. The project is basically a networked art project where individual artists create their own 30x42cm work of art with stamps, drawings, stickers and so forth. This is sent to Cohen, who prints each cell - 150 copies each - with a cyclostyle (now out of production). One copy is sent to the author, as well as other participants. New editions are published every 8 to 10 days. To date, there have been hundreds of issues.

Cohen described the origin of the project's name in 1985:

"Well, I’ll title my work “Brain Cell”, because the structure of a brain through a microscope looks like the diagram of the Mail Art network. Thousands of Neurons clung and piled up together are just like the Mail Art network, I believe."

Brain Cell is an art experiment in the vein of networked mail art, where a network expands from A to B, B to C, C to A and so on. These type of art projects emphasise user collaboration, with different artistic inputs being modified, copied, forwarded and even returned to the originator. This produces a series of cybernetic cells, which can interact in a non-linear order. Brain Cell has enlisted over 5,000 contibutors from 80 nations since 1985 [1]

1. Art for Networks, 2002. Edited by Simon Pope and Hannah Firth. Chapter Arts, Cardiff