From Engram to Print: Recording the Brain, Pressing it onto Matter

Emotional Printing is an art-science project that captures brain electrical activity and prints it onto paper. The idea is simple: our brains constantly produce electrical patterns that carry our emotions, thoughts, and memories, but they remain invisible, locked inside the skull. What if we could pull them out and fix them onto a physical surface? The first edition (2024) used deep brain recordings from a single patient to create screenprints where the ink slowly oxidizes over time. The image changes, the way a memory does. The second edition opens the door to everyone: a participant wears a portable EEG headset, watches a short video, and their brain activity is printed in real time, a unique emotional fingerprint they take home. This talk presents the idea behind the project: the desire to make the immaterial tangible, to give a physical body to something as fleeting as an emotion, and to explore what happens when neuroscience meets printmaking

About Mehdi Sicre

Mehdi Sicre is a neuroscientist at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Tokyo and an artist. His work explores one idea: recording real memory traces, the electrical patterns the brain produces when we feel, think, and experience, and printing them onto physical supports. Through Emotional Printing, his ongoing series since 2024, he experiments with different papers and printing techniques, searching for ways to inscribe the invisible activity of the brain into the matter of the world. He collaborates with fine art printer Hiroshi Itami.

• The talk will be in English
• The talk will be at BioClub and online at Zoom