Synaesthesia / 2: Space and Perception
Madi Boyd
Carrie C Firman

Opening: 25.1.2013, 8 PM
Exhibition runs: 26.01. - 10.03.2013
Open: Fri-Sun, 2-6 PM and by appointment. Open on 30 and 31 January during the Transmediale 13.

Inquiries into the nature of Space and Perception are the basis of Art Laboratory Berlin's second exhibition in the Synaesthesia series. Synaesthesia, the experience of two or more sensory impressionsat the same time, is both an artistic paradigm and neurological phenomenon. Two installations by Madi Boyd and Carrie C Firman explore the connection between perception and experience of mind and body from a synaesthetic point of view.

Madi Boyd is a synaesthete from Great Britain, whose artistic work focuses on perception and the brain. In collaboration with neuro-scientists, Dr. Mark Lythgoe and Dr. Beau Lotto, from University College London her work incorporates and combines installation, film and sculpture. Her recent project The Point of Perception explores how much information the human brain needs in order to know what it is looking at. It is an art experience and scientific arena about vision. The installation uses moving image and built environments to confuse depth perception and is designed to act specifically on the human eye and brain to create a space of uncertainty. A newly developed version of the project will be presented at Art Laboratory Berlin with the addition of sound and colour. The idea is to assign musical notes and colours to specific points in the gridded space, in order to explore perception of geometric space and sound.

Carrie C Firman is an emerging electronic artist from the US. She is a synaesthete and her work is inspired by studying and experiencing the crossing of senses. She sees synaesthesia not only as a sensory phenomenon, but also a fantastic world interface, responsible for completely unique perceptual experiences. Her current work encourages its participants to reconsider their perception as an entirely unique phenomenon, helping them to come to the realization that even most basic level of perception differs widely between otherwise similar individuals. Firman's installation Synexperience as well as her interactive digital work My Synesthetic Library invite viewers to share in her own unique perceptual experience of the world.

Regine Rapp & Christian de Lutz (curators)

Synaesthesia/2: Space and Perception

Time and Technology | Panel led by Regine Rapp & Christian de Lutz

Gretta Louw | Controlling_Connectivity
Daniel Belasco Rogers & Sophia New | Narrating Our Lines
Ellen Sebring, MIT| Atmosphere: Disorientation in Visual Narrative as a Time Traveler’s Tool
Dr. Yasuhiro Sakamoto | Sound Sculptures as Embodiment of Cross-modal Gesamtgestalt

More information at http://mutamorphosis.org/2012/
http://mutamorphosis.org/2012/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/PROGRAMME_MutaMorphosis.pdf

Time & Technology at MutaMorphosis

As part of the new series Synaesthesia, Art Laboratory Berlin presents the first exhibition The Orange Smell of November with new works by Barbara Ryan and Annette Stahmer.

The new installation That can’t be September – it smells like the August of 1985! by Barbara Ryan combines the artist’s intimate personal relationship between scent, colour, time and space, played out within the city of Berlin, where she lived in the 1990s. In the video A ist blau by Anntete Stahmer the artist’s mother, a grapheme synaesthete, talks about and also demonstrates her unique and subjective colour perception of vowels. The work is done both with extraordinary accuracy, as well as a strong poetic sense of the connection between consciousness, language and reality.
(http://www.artlaboratory-berlin.org/html/eng-exh-archive.htm)

Curated by Regine Rapp and Christian de Lutz

Synaesthesia/ I: The Orange Smell of November

Too Artful to be a Virtual Soul.”
Performance, Psychology and Social Media in Gretta Louw’s project
Controlling_Connectivity
From 2-12 November, 2011 the Australian artist Gretta Louw staged Controlling_Connectivity, a
10 day online performance. Locked into the shuttered rooms of the arts centre Art Laboratory
Berlin she spent 240 hours online, offering her availability around the clock for chats, video
conferences and Twitter dialogues. She chose a popular set of social networking sites – Skype,
Facebook, Twitter and Google+ as well as documenting the performance on a Tumblr blog
(http://controllingconnectivity.tumblr.com/). The main purpose of the performance was to
research the psychological effects of total internet immersion, but almost immediately a
sociological component competed for her attention and that of many of the performance’s
viewer/participants. In fact, the project attracted a number of participants from various online
sub-cultures: users of Second Life; enthusiasts of Google+’s multi-user video conferencing
platform ‘Hangout’; a long time internet artist, whose own oeuvre has included online
performance; a psychoanalyst who studies the therapeutic effects of virtual realities....


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Christian de Lutz