Brain Cell Repulsion is a mail art project begun by Ryosuke Cohen in June 1985. The project is a networked art project where individual artists contribute stamps, stickers, drawings or other images. These are sent through the mail to Cohen, who assembles and prints them as part of each cell. He prints 150 copies (30 x 42 cm) with a small silkscreen system called a Cyclostyle (now out of production). Each participant is mailed a Brain Cell print along with a documentation list of contributors worldwide.
Cohen keeps a copy for himself. Some of the remaining Brain Cell prints from each edition are assembled into sets of 30 consecutive editions. These set are sent to artists and Mail Art shows around the world.
Cohen also uses Brain Cell prints in the Fractal Portrait Project (another long running art series by Cohen) and as additions to Mail Art Add and Pass pages.
New Brain Cell editions are published every eight to ten days. More than nine hundred editions have been published.
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, 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 enlisted over 6,000 contributors from 80 nations between 1985 and 2002. [1]
More than 1200 different Brain Cell prints have been created (Brain Cell nr 1232 was issued in January 2025). [2]
In mathematics, a fractal is a geometric shape containing detailed structure at arbitrarily small scales, usually having a fractal dimension strictly exceeding the topological dimension. Many fractals appear similar at various scales, as illustrated in successive magnifications of the Mandelbrot set. This exhibition of similar patterns at increasingly smaller scales is called self-similarity, also known as expanding symmetry or unfolding symmetry; if this replication is exactly the same at every scale, as in the Menger sponge, the shape is called affine self-similar. Fractal geometry lies within the mathematical branch of measure theory.
An artistamp or artist's stamp is a postage stamp-like art form used to depict or commemorate any subject its creator chooses. Artistamps are a form of Cinderella stamps in that they are not valid for postage, but they differ from forgeries or bogus Illegal stamps in that typically the creator has no intent to defraud postal authorities or stamp collectors.
Ruud Janssen is a Dutch Fluxus and mail artist currently living in Breda in the Netherlands.
Mail art, also known as postal art and correspondence art, is an artistic movement centered on sending small-scale works through the postal service. It developed out of what eventually became Ray Johnson's New York Correspondence School and the Fluxus movements of the 1960s. It has since developed into a global, ongoing movement.
Email art refers to artwork created for the medium of email. It includes computer graphics, animations, screensavers, digital scans of artwork in other media, and even ASCII art. When exhibited, Email art can be either displayed on a computer screen or similar type of display device, or the work can be printed out and displayed.
Ryosuke Cohen is a mail artist. He was responsible for the Brain Cell mail art project, which he began in June 1985 and retains thousands of members in more than 80 countries, e.g. Hans Braumüller, Theo Breuer, Michael Leigh or Litsa Spathi. In August 2001 he began the Fractal Portrait Project. He has taught art to school children for more than 25 years.
The Canadian Encyclopedia is the national encyclopedia of Canada, published online by the Toronto-based historical organization Historica Canada, with financial support by the federal Department of Canadian Heritage and Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada. Compiled by more then 5,000 scholars and specialists, the publication is a non-partisan, non-political initiative by a not-for-profit organization without political or governmental ties.
Mental Floss is an American online magazine and digital, print, and e-commerce media company focused on millennials. It is owned by Minute Media and based in New York City, United States. mentalfloss.com, which presents facts, puzzles, and trivia with a humorous tone, draws 20.5 million unique users a month. Its YouTube channel produces three weekly series and has 1.3 million subscribers. In October 2015, Mental Floss teamed with the National Geographic Channel for its first televised special, Brain Surgery Live with mental_floss, the first brain surgery ever broadcast live.
The Cyclostyle duplicating process is a form of stencil copying. A stencil is cut on wax or glazed paper by using a pen-like object with a small rowel or spur-wheel on its tip. A large number of small short lines are cut out in the glazed paper, removing the glaze with the spur-wheel, then ink is applied. It was invented in the later 19th century by David Gestetner, who named it cyclostyle after a drawing tool he used. Its name incorporates stylus, Classical Latin for a pen.
Rod Summers, born in Dorset, England, is a sound, visual, conceptual artist, performance poet, dramatist, mail artist and book artist, publisher, archivist, and lecturer on intermedia. He is based in Maastricht, Netherlands.
Fluxus 1 is an artists' book edited and produced by the Lithuanian-American artist George Maciunas, containing works by a series of artists associated with Fluxus, the international collective of avant-garde artists primarily active in the 1960s and 1970s. Originally published in New York, 1964, the contents vary from edition to edition, but usually contain work by Ay-O, George Brecht, Alison Knowles, György Ligeti, Yoko Ono, Robert Watts and La Monte Young amongst many others.
Internet art is a form of new media art distributed via the Internet. This form of art circumvents the traditional dominance of the physical gallery and museum system. In many cases, the viewer is drawn into some kind of interaction with the work of art. Artists working in this manner are sometimes referred to as net artists.
Anne Lee Long, known professionally as Anna Banana, was a Canadian artist known for her mail art, performance art, writing, and work as a small press publisher. She has been described as an "entrepreneur and critic" who helped pioneer the artistamp, a postage-stamp-sized medium. She was prominent in the mail art network since the early 1970s, acting as a bridge between the movement's early history and its second generation. As a publisher, Banana launched Vile magazine and the "Banana Rag" newsletter; the latter became Artistamp News in 1996. Her archive of mail art-related papers is housed at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia.
Patterns in nature are visible regularities of form found in the natural world. These patterns recur in different contexts and can sometimes be modelled mathematically. Natural patterns include symmetries, trees, spirals, meanders, waves, foams, tessellations, cracks and stripes. Early Greek philosophers studied pattern, with Plato, Pythagoras and Empedocles attempting to explain order in nature. The modern understanding of visible patterns developed gradually over time.
George Alexander Walker is a Canadian artist and writer best known for his wood engravings and wordless novels.
The Comic and Fantasy Art Amateur Press Association (CFA-APA) was founded in 1985 by Roger Hill. Its membership consists of knowledgeable fans, creators, and collectors of comic and fantasy art who write about various subjects related to those genres. The group self-publishes approximately three times a year and each issue has a theme relating to a specific creator or subject. Currently, membership is limited to 40 persons at any one time and circulation is limited to 55 issues, making the publication itself highly collectible.
Mark Bloch is an American conceptual artist, mail artist, performance artist, visual artist, archivist and writer whose work combines visuals and text as well as performance and media to explore ideas of long-distance communication, including across time.
Anna Aleksandrovna Tarshis, better known as Ry Nikonova or Rea Nikonova, was a Russian artist, poet, and writer. Many of her artworks are held in private and public collections throughout the world.
Ginny Lloyd is an American artist, noted for her work with mail art, photocopy art, performance art and photography. She organized the Copy Art Exhibition in San Francisco in 1980 with programming devoted to promoting xerography. Her work was included in the exhibition, From Bonnard to Baselitz: A Decade of Acquisitions by the Prints Collection 1978–1988 and listed annually since 1992 in Benezit Dictionary of Artists.
Joel S. Cohen is an American graphic artist and cofounder, along with Diane E. Milder, of Ragged Edge Press, an independent offset printing company in New York City. Principally recognized for his creative mail art projects and artistic collaborations with Thomas Kerr and Kurt Vonnegut, Cohen has been creating, printing, and distributing progressive political art since the early 1970s.