STREAMING CONSCIOUSNESS
In dialogue with Rune Brink
FVTVRIST Magazine // 11 September 2026
FVTVRIST met Rune Brink ahead of Ghost in the Thread at ArtVerse in Paris, curated by Valentina Buzzi. The exhibition traces a line from Jacquard’s punch-card loom to Nam June Paik’s cathode-ray interventions and into the present, premised on the idea that a pixel and a woven knot have more in common than might appear at first glance.
For the exhibition, Rune Brink developed Streaming Consciousness, a project in which a neural network is trained on the visual data of a water vortex and then given control over it, a closed loop between a machine and the thing it was made to understand. The work asks, without settling the question, whether consciousness might arise in any system complex enough, or whether there is something that code can never reach.
.jpg)
Rune Brink, photo: Therese Lærke
You work under your own name, as well as under the name Spøgelsesmaskinen, which translates as “Ghost Machine.” Where does this name come from, and what does it mean to you?
In the late eighties we got our first computer at home, an IBM PS/1 that stood in the corner of my room. It was a mysterious entity for me, and even connected to the stars, as my astrologer mother would use it to calculate horoscopes for her clients. I soon began exploring this mysterious machine, and even wrote a simple chatbot that would respond to my commands. The first time it responded HELLO RUNE, I was convinced there was a ghost in the machine.
When I started making GIFs in 2021, I chose the name Spøgelsesmaskinen in Danish to evoke curiosity. But I am now back to working under my own name.
Your work keeps returning to obsolete interfaces and the emotional residue of technologies we've stopped using. Is this a form of nostalgia, or perhaps a way of paying respect?
For me this is a kind of shortcut to the special memories we have of encountering something profound for the first time, which technology was for me. I believe it's the same for many people growing up in the golden days of computer technology, whether in the pre-internet time like me, or later in the Windows 95, early internet, Myspace and Napster era. The aesthetics of those interfaces and devices bring back that feeling.
The Desktop, Rune Brink
courtesy of the artist and Bricks Gallery
Spatial and artistic concept + animation for the light installation "KONSTRUKTUR"
Exhibited at Nikolaj Kunsthal, Horsens Kunstmuseum
and Utzon Center Aalborg.
Created with Yoke Aps, build and designed by Tobias Ebsen
The pixel and light are both materials in your work, but they behave very differently: one is a unit, the other a field. Where do they meet in your practice?
To me they have always been intertwined. In my work KONSTRUKTUR (in collaboration with YOKE) from 2018, we built huge pixels focused into light beams, allowing us to paint pixels extruded into architectural structures in space.
Much like the mystery of the double-slit experiment, this fascinating duality of light is what drives my work with the medium. Light has the ability to be present in multiple places at once — the holder of time and space that shape our reality.
Streaming Consciousness project begins with a genuinely open question: whether consciousness arises in any sufficiently complex system, or whether there is something that code cannot reach. Do you have a position on this, or is the work a way of not having to take one? More broadly, which definition of consciousness do you find yourself gravitating towards?
I've always been inspired by the ancient idea that we humans are connected on a deeper level. I remember Björk once said that our gut feeling is our tap into a shared consciousness.
When I started reading Roger Penrose and his proposed Orch-OR theory in The Emperor's New Mind, where he argues that there might be more to consciousness than mathematics, it instantly connected the dots for me. I still tend to believe that consciousness in living organisms is something other than what we see emerging in large language models, for example.
Streaming Consciousness, Rune Brink;
Ghost in the thread exhibition views, ArtVerse Gallery, 2026, Paris
Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Collet
You give a neural network a body of water and let it control the vortex it was trained on. It’s a closed loop with no external input. What did you expect to happen initially, and what actually happened?
Watching the neural network explore the water vortex has been extremely inspiring for me, and this will definitely be an ongoing experiment. The network runs a small simulation of the data it receives from the vortex, and that is all we get to see of its "experience" of the water for now.
The spiral form runs throughout the project: DNA, proteins, phyllotaxis, the vortex. It's a shape that life seems to keep returning to. Was mathematics the entry point for you, or did you arrive at the spiral through the water itself?
As opposed to the fluctuations of light, water for me has always been pure presence. My curiosity about water led me to Theodor Schwenk, an anthroposophist and water researcher who argues in his book Sensitive Chaos that water itself carries formative powers, and that the centre of the vortex, due to its spiral mathematics, could be a portal to something "celestial," as he puts it. This gave me the idea to use water as a kind of portal to consciousness, and to allow a neural network to enter into symbiosis with it.
Rune Brink, Entelechy, 2025
LED screens, glass, stainless steel, electronics, original GIF animations,
power supply, 50 × 35 × 12 cm
An ongoing research into flow forms and materials, the title taken from
the Aristotelian term for the realisation of potential.
Custom hand-built and designed by the artist at Art Hub Copenhagen.
Courtesy of the artist
Rune Brink, The Blue Hour, 2024. Ten hand-built glass and steel lanterns, sound. Created with Den Sorte Skole, curated by Majken Overgaard.
Christiansborg Palace Chapel, Copenhagen.
Photo: Therese Lærke
The exhibition's premise is that Jacquard's punch-card loom and the digital grid share the same structural DNA, that a pixel and a woven knot are functionally analogous. Does this reading change the way you think about your own work?
Yes, definitely. I'm currently reading Thread Ripper by the Danish artist Amalie Smith, where she explores the possibility of life emerging in even these simple binary systems, and also argues that computer and pixel systems, due to the matrix nature of the loom, were in a sense invented thousands of years before electricity was discovered.
Curator Valentina Buzzi frames the glitch not as a failure, but as a semantic space, a liminal territory where new meaning can emerge. Your work engages with digital nostalgia and the poetic anomalies embedded in everyday interfaces. So what is the glitch for you: an error you preserve, or something you actively seek out?
The glitch for me is always the low resolution — a small surprise in the outcome of whether a pixel will light up or not, and how the final image is rendered. It creates a certain imperfect beauty that has an honest and transparent nature, like a friendly computer system you can touch and understand.
Permanent public light installation in the park of Helsingør Healthcenter, Denmark. The installation turns on at night, and the wind
or bypassers can rotate the installation,
to create a light play in the crown of the trees.
About Rune Brink
Rune Brink (b. 1979, Odense) is a Copenhagen-based artist whose work moves between light installation, scenography, and pixelated 3D animation, drawn together by a long-standing interest in the uncanny life of machines and in what they might be said to know. His work has been shown at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Nikolaj Kunsthal, the Royal Danish Theatre, the Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm, Christiansborg Palace Chapel, and Bricks Gallery in Copenhagen. From 2021 he released digital work under the alias Spøgelsesmaskinen, now folded into his practice under his own name.
_edited.jpg)
