Satoru Takahashi and Sophia Psarra
Spectacles of the Mind
A video installation for the "Arts and the Brain" event, November 1, 2007
On November 1–2, 2007, the University hosted four interdisciplinary studios as part of the Arts on Earth initiative—"that stimulates, explores, and celebrates the dynamic relationship between people and their arts worldwide"—in which leading international artists, scientists, scholars, activists, and students explored the interactions of art and mind. Sophia Psarra, an associate architecture professor, lead Arts and the Brain one of the four studios that explored the ways in which artistic engagement affects the human brain. As part of the studio event, Satoru Takahashi, an assistant professor in the School of Art and Design, and Sophia Psarra designed a video installation addressing the interaction between space, memory, cognition, and narrative.
Click above to watch a short video of the exhibit...
Project Description
“Speculate, reflect: every thinking activity implies mirrors for me. According to Plotinus the soul is a mirror reflecting the ideas of a higher reason”
—Italo Calvino
Starting with the old philosophical connection between the mirror and the mind and with the idea that mental processes are supported by neural network activity in the brain we designed a video installation incorporating space, movement, image and sound.
Our purpose was to create an environment and an interactive journey, where visual and audio stimuli travel, distort, rebound and multiply through a network of reflections, linking metaphorically the ways in which the body experiences space with the ways in which the mind processes and recalls information.
We wanted these occurrences to have no definitive shape, but one that emerged from the interaction of bodies with space. We saw visitors as an integral part of this environment, interrupting and carrying the projections with their movement in the real-time experience of the installation.
We were also interested in the dialogue between an immersive experience and a panoramic one, or between frames of reference related to one's own body and multiple frames of reference where simultaneous actions, routes, and narratives define the experience. In the former, spatial navigation is related to the particular perspective of a perceiver. In the latter navigation relates to a framework which is external and independent of the viewer's position in space. Our intention was to create a metaphorical translation of the "egocentric" and "allocentric" frames of reference describing body navigation from psychology and neuroscience to space and narrative.
Our interest in immersive and panoramic experience is motivated by the epistemological and operating practices of our disciplines (art, architecture and design) concerned with the relationship between the part and the whole, and the simultaneous use of perceptual and conceptual frameworks in designing space and ordering experience. Another influence is the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges.
Using notions like mirrors and primitive spatial topographies as allegories for language Borges expressed the gap between the total conception of the world laid out as infinite possibility, and the time bound life of humans whose destiny to experience a system from within prevents them from grasping its total construction. The mirror reflections in our installation introduce the notion of infinity and the labyrinth as metaphors for the mind, its associations, memories and strata of consciousness. The projected images were bottom-up and top-down views of cities and places establishing a connection between the mental labyrinth of thought and the experiential physical labyrinth of urban narratives.
Technical description
The installation consisted of nine double-sided mirror surfaces on a grid onto which images were projected from the two ends of the spatial arrangement. These images were reflected and distorted through the network of mirrors translating the notion of neural networks to an experiential network of information through the reflections.
The same images featured on the two ends of a large screen and on two smaller screens at the periphery of the studio. At the centre of the large screen was a projection of a top-down view captured by a camera that was positioned over the installation. The video projections and the top-down view encapsulated the dialogue between a narrative based on immersive experience and an omniscient narrative referring to all actions and all spatial positions.
These projections extended the idea of immersive versus panoramic vision by alternating from single-view-point perspectives of diverse urban environments to aerials, maps and satellite images of different cities and places. By linking human view points with cartographic and satellite imagery we were able to connect between dialectic opposites like time and space, subjective and objective, synchronic and diachronic, experiencing place and understanding its location in space, fragment and whole, universal and particular, local and global, ephemeral and eternal.