The project should be understood as a cognitive experiment in perception or an attempt at expanding consciousness. The eye scans each new image to make sense of what it sees, searching to recognize the successively transmuting Brynntrup, and meanwhile, without a narrative, the mind races behind the fleeting moments of recognition, attempting to create connections with the preceding image. Brynntrup described the images of Herzsofort.setzung enigmatically as “stimulating the retina’s sense of touch in order to make the folds of the brain palpable.” The project seeks to make us physically aware of the physical faculties of perception and cognition. Herz establishes an associative web of images that ultimately bring that-which-cannot-be-physically-felt into awareness and that-which-cannot-be-contained-in-language into picture. Within this project, then, we find that the picture drives the logical facts of thought, thought in its most physical sense as literally the perceptive faculty.

Brynntrup’s work thus performs a fundamental critique of descriptionist cognitive science, suggesting that the descriptionists ignored or overlooked the fact that in cognitive development, seeing precedes speaking, and while the ability to communicate in language must indeed be understood as a fundamental structure of cognitive processes, this faculty is preceded by abilities to perceive, recognize, and respond that are more primary than the spoken word. The ability to perceive is a faculty more primary and if not fundamental certainly not subordinated to any deep structures of spoken language. But Brynntrup’s works go further than simply reasserting the model of imagist cognitive science, ultimately rejecting both imagist and descriptionist approaches. As experiments they point to a fundamental and problematic unexamined presumption of interiority in both the imagist and descriptionist directions in cognitive science. Both directions fundamentally concentrate on processes in the brain as generators of perception and cognition, not considering the role of the “exterior” world. Critical of the general concept of interiority in cognitive science and analytic philosophy, Brynntrup offers evidence of what we could term a phenomenological approach. There is not simply an interior, neither is there some behaviorist exterior that is at work; rather, there is a calling out into a world that invites perception and a development of cognition. Brynntrup’s experimental work reinforces the fact that perception is not a thing in itself. Perception is always perception of something. In perception the surface and boundaries of the body and the world take shape.

Brynntrup’s films offer a neo-avant-garde response to both analytic philosophy and cognitive science by creating an actual experience of the faculty of perception. These works give the observer a chance to become aware of a logic that precedes the rational sense-making of descriptive speech. It is not nonsense but rather the sensible production of a provocational ineffable. The provocational ineffable is not to be confused with techniques of Brechtian distanciation that were deployed especially in the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 70s. The ineffable Brynntrup produces is about distance from emotions but about experiencing something in cognition that cannot be expressed in words, that even precedes words. Speech cannot represent everything one sees, and conversely one can imagine and make as image that whereof one cannot speak. The strategies of representation in Brynntrup’s films are thus often cryptic, aestheticized, associative, often dissociative—the connections one begins to make fall apart in a visual and sensory overload. This overload is a provocation to cognition, eliciting in the spectator a sense of the ineffable. (The ineffable here is akin to the sublime, but not that of Kant’s rationalization of “threatening” excesses, rather that of Schiller’s more fundamental celebration of the emotive or affective states the sublime unleashes in the subject.)[18] In such provocation the subject becomes aware of other processes at work, which are generally masked by cognition, especially emotion and affect. It is in this regard that Brynntrup’s work makes some of its most compelling interventions in current debates.