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Symposium
Alan
Dunning
The Mnemonic Body (Einstein's Brain Project)
Presented
Sunday May 12th at 3 pm
The
Einstein's Brain Project uses the coincidences of science,
culture, technology and art to examine the fundamentally contingent
nature of consciousness and the making of meaning. The work
has grown out of an interest in bodies in motion, worlds in
flux and in the endlessly recombinant texts and forms of our
worlds and out of an interest in the seen and unseen, the
half perceived and misperceived things at the limits of our
perception and in the reanimation of the lost bodies and past
events that constitute this invisible world. We are sure that
the world is not entirely what it appears to be and that the
surface of the visible world needs only to be scratched to
reveal the invisible world below.
Using
the strategy of the derive, the notion of the world as a moment
to moment construction, and the revelation of the invisible
narratives embedded in our material world, the project is
developing spaces founded in psycho-geography. The work concerns
itself with the idea of the world as an enormous library where
everything is out of order. Travel books sit next to philosophical
treatises and first-aid manuals. The inexhaustible inventory
of the streets contains endlessly varied and recombining bits
of information resulting in the most unlikely juxtapositions
and unexpected events and discoveries. The world is layered
with histories and distant geographies, invisible, but, waiting
to be discovered like some "…new NorthWest Passage
in the backstreets of Paris."
Using
recent work from the Einstein's Brain Project as examples,
the talk will discuss the Mnemonic body - the body as a repository
of memory, the Stone Tapes - the idea of the body and its
environment as a recording medium for traumatic images and
events that transmits its message directly to the brain, and
the Surrogate Body - the establishment of a credible and trustworthy
virtual body built from a one-to-one correspondence with a
participant's biological data.
The
Einstein's Brain is a collaborative, immersive, virtual and
augmented reality work that explores the notion of the brain
as a real and metaphoric interface between bodies and worlds
in flux and that examines the idea of the world as a construct
sustained through the neurological processes contained within
the brain. The talk will suggest that the world is not some
reality outside ourselves, but, is the result of an interior
process that makes and sustains our body image and its relationship
to a world, and that the investigation of virtual reality,
its potential use as a perceptual filter, and its accompanying
social space is an exploration of the new constructions of
consciousness and the consequent technological colonization
of the body.
Alan
Dunning - Biography
Alan Dunning has been creating immersive installation since
1979. His work is in many collections, including the National
Gallery of Canada and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
He is currently Chair of Media Arts and Digital Technologies
at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary.
Paul
Woodrow - Biography
Paul Woodrow has been involved in inter-disciplinary and multi-media
activities since the late 1960s, including performance, installation,
video, painting and music presentations at the Museum of Modern
Art, Stockholm and The Tate Gallery, London. He is presently
coordinator of Art Theory in the Department of Art, University
of Calgary.
Dr.
Morley Hollenberg - Biography
Dr. Morley Hollenberg is a Professor in the Department of
Medicine, University of Calgary. A Rhodes Scholar at Oxford
University folllowing his MD at Johns Hopkins, his research
interests focus on receptor mechanisms and signal transduction
pathways. His work has been published in over 235 refereed
manuscripts and book chapters.
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