Nina Sobell: Proximity Effects

Nina Sobell | Proximity Effects

June 4 - July 26, 2026

Opening Reception: June 4, 7-9pm

GammaTime Live Performances : June 4th, 8pm | June 27th, 5pm | July 26th, 5pm

Various/Artists presents interactive performance, video, and prints by the artist Nina Sobell chronicling her pioneering exploration of technology and human connection across six decades. Proximity Effects surveys Sobell's innovative use of brainwaves as an interactive artistic medium in participatory performances and installations beginning with BrainWave Drawings in 1974 and culminating in the newest version of GammaTime in 2026.

Sobell and collaborators Ed Bear and Lucinda Jacobson will perform GammaTime at the opening on June 4, 2026 and twice more throughout the exhibition. GammaTime is Sobell's latest social neurofeedback performance in which four participants wear electroencephalograph (EEG) headsets and headphones while viewing a projected audio-visualization representing their collective brain activity. The image shifts between discrete shapes into a unified whole as participants achieve inter-brain synchrony by watching, listening, and being together in this inherently generative work.

A multichannel video installation presents selected excerpts from Sobell's socially engaged neurofeedback works from 1974 to 1998, showing how she adapts her approach and collaborations in a way that anticipates the broader adoption of technology in society. These range from closed-circuit video and laboratory computers with Mike Trivich, personal computers and interactive computer graphics with Chris Matthews, and multimedia and social internet connectivity with Emily Hartzell and others.

In each brainwave performance, Sobell devises innovative configurations of neurotechnology and media tools to enable groups of participants to observe their intermingled brain activity. Sobell stresses the artistic importance of teaching participants to connect through her work, including the physical touch involved in helping participants wear hand-stitched and hand-wired EEG headsets, and emphasizes how this moment of interpersonal connection, and the subsequent physical proximity of the participants seated together is essential for achieving inter-brain synchrony. The audiovisual imagery created throughout is not the final product of the work, but a means of constructing social sculpture through the physical involvement of the participants with the artist and each other.

Sobell's brainwave works are presented alongside related work in video and print that similarly examine the convergence of technology with intertwined consciousness. A series of photographs of conté and ink drawings of video static convey Sobell's commitment to the material continuities across media and the people who sense and perceive through them. A pair of video performance works show how Sobell uses video to sculpt intimate social interactions. In the Portapak work Hair Comb (1974), Sobell and performer Susan Krentzman engage in a ritualistic process of mimicry and transformation, while 25lbs of clay / Right Brain Left Brain Investigation of a Creative Process (1990) depicts Sobell engaging in a haptic perceptual challenge of sculpting both a clay figure and a mediated video image of performer Rebecca Yeldham without looking at her workpiece.

Other works, including excerpts from the sprawling Park Bench project begun with Emily Hartzell in 1993, seek connectivity through the development of a public kiosk for early internet access and local community building. Park Bench soon developed into a “NetWork” of over 84 inter-connected online media performances. A selection of these are on display within a new kiosk including a series, Web Seance: Brainwave Drawing from 1999, which addresses the physical disconnectedness of the “information age”.

Sobell's work resonates with recent developments in social neuroscience that shows that the human brain is inherently social and always physically entangled with other minds, materials, and forces. Nina Sobell invites you to continue exploring how media technology transforms interpersonal connection and social space with her from June 4 to July 26, 2026.

– Allen Riley

Nina Sobell is a contemporary sculptor, multimedia, and performance artist who pioneered the use of EEG technology, closed-circuit television, and internet communication in the art world. Early in her career, she focused on experimental forms of interaction and performance, and explored the ways in which technology mediates psychic transformations and modulates the perception of space and time. Her substantial body of work includes live performance and TV, museum installations, sculpture, and interactive video matrices that invited public participation.

Sobell began using video in 1969 at Cornell, to observe spectators' interactions with her sculptures which were placed anonymously in public areas. Immersing herself at the intersection of video and sculpture, Sobell became fascinated with creating psycho-social transformations via video technology, making environments and mobile structures to physically engage the viewer.

Her exploration of video's relation to the subconscious and thinking of herself as an electronic medium, led Sobell to conceive of the groundbreaking Interactive Electroencephalographic Video Drawings (BrainWave Drawings) in 1973. Created in collaboration with systems engineer Mike Trivich, BrainWave Drawings enabled two participants to see their brainwaves matching in real time as they watched their own images simultaneously on closed-circuit video.

Sobell's trailblazing work explored the relationship between artist and audience and generated an improvisational feedback loop as the participants silently attempted to communicate with each other. In 1974, Sobell and Trivich installed Brainwave Drawings in Dr. M. Barry Sterman's Neuropsychology Lab at the Sepulveda VA Medical Center in Sepulveda, Ca. There, the installation affirmed the existence of non-verbal influences on communication between two people. Brainwave Drawings opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 1975 as EEG Video Telemetry Environment.

Sobell's sculptures, installations, and video art have been widely exhibited and screened internationally, including the DIA Art Foundation, ZKM (Center for Media Art in Karlsruhe), MIT Vera List Gallery, the Getty Museum and Research Institute, the Institute for Contemporary Art, the Whitechapel Gallery, and Acme Gallery, London, the Whitney Museum of American Art, at FIU Behaviour workshop at Documenta 6, part of Joseph Beuys' 100 days, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, Kunst Forum, Vienna, Hammer, Los Angeles, and David Zwirner Gallery, New York. Her works are in video archives, and numerous public and private art collections.

Ed Bear is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, and engineer. Their work with robotics, sound, video, transmission, and collective improvisation recalibrates social relationships with material technology and waste. As an educator and designer committed to an equitable, open-source world, they research material reuse as social practice.

They completed artist/technology residencies at Pioneer Works (2019), Harvest Works (2017), Signal Culture (2017), Until 11 (2016), Wave Farm (2015), LMCC Swing Space (2012), Free103.9 AIRtime Fellow (2010) and received a Roulette Emerging Composer Commission (2008). Bear’s sculptures and performances are dedicated to kindling the embers of embodied energy inside trashed, buried, and abandoned electronics.

Bear has toured extensively as a performer and teacher, working with organizations including: The London School of Economics, IXDA, Museo Tamayo, The Mattress Factory, MoMA-PS1, Eyebeam, The Montreal Pop Festival, Moogfest, and Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Their music is available on Peira, Azul Discographica, Ever/Never, and Roar Tapes.

In 2009 and 2010, Bear received NSF and other funds to study e-waste streams as educational resources, software defined radio, and novel energy harvesting utilizing ionic polymer metal composites. As a research specialist at the Lighting Research Center (2012-2013), funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, they developed control solutions for emerging solid-state lighting systems. Until 2019, they worked with littleBits, Inc. developing gender-neutral, modular electronics for education. Bear founded Kin Circuits in 2020, a consultancy elevating maintenance, care, repair, and reuse in the face of unsustainable consumption and alienating technologies.

Lucinda Jacobson is a multi-faceted artist-performer from New York City. She studied dramatic arts at Laguardia High School and has since gone on to study film and digital art, getting her degree in the liberal arts at Sarah Lawrence college. She is currently working as an artist in New York.