Sculpture Field. Extra. What if we lived in. thought was public? Gunnar Green and Bernhard Hopfengärtner

Transcription

1 Sculpture Field Extra Room: What if we lived in a society where our every thought was public?

2 thresholds 40 How will the scientific discoveries about the workings of the human brain affect the way we perceive ourselves? Will we fall back into a more functionalist understanding of the human, as developed in the nineteenth century? During the past several years, cultural implications of neuro-technologies have been widely discussed in the press Fig. 1. In 2009, Wired published an article about a conviction for murder in India based on brainwave patterns. Detectives showed photographs of the crime scene to the suspect and claimed that the brainwaves produced proved the suspect s experiential knowledge of the images. 1 At the same time, a story about the usage of MRI scanners for job interviews spread across blogs. A Dutch scientist claimed that using this technique would be possible and practicable within five years. 2 How will neuro-technologies transform our culture and the way we think about ourselves and about others? 3 And how can we approach and explore this topic as designers? Extra Room investigates the very extreme of possible developments and asks: What if we lived in a society where our every thought was public? Extra Room is a design project combining scale models and narrative elements, that reflects on how advances in neuroscience and technology might affect our self-perception. The Extra Room exists in an imaginary world where technology has been developed to read the human mind. As the mind becomes transparent in this world, a new necessity of protective self-discipline emerges. Utilizing the effects of sensory deprivation and methods of military interrogation, the room enables subjects to adjust their thinking and beliefs. The Extra Room, a reverse-disciplinary architecture, is built into the basement of a multi-story building where it is shared by the house s inhabitants Fig. 2. The dimensions are three meters by four meters; it is soundproof, carpeted, windowless, and has only one door. 4 The surfaces are tilted such that there are no horizontal floors or vertical walls to prevent any spatial orientation and to induce mental unrest Fig Extra Room also includes a process people that would subject themselves to, in order to achieve desired psychological alterations. Using the Extra Room s sensory deprivation unit, interrogation room, and prison cell, the process itself is inspired by experiments on sensory deprivation. As shown by Jack A. Vernon, after spending 24 hours in a completely dark and soundproof room, people who were subjected to propaganda showed to be eight times more susceptive compared to a control group. 6 This result leads to the possibility of using the effect, mildly exaggerated, for the purpose of self-induced mind control. The procedure would be as follows: A person starts their session in complete darkness Fig. 4. During the whole time, liquid nutrition can be accessed through The Valve on the wall inside the room Fig. 5. Liquid nutrition is chosen to eliminate the experience of time, a consequence discrete food items such as sandwiches would have. The Extra Room also has a toilet Fig. 6. After 36 hours with no stimuli, the room lightens, and at this stage the person s mind would be hungry for new input. A speaker, The Prompter, cites the desired alterations that have been programmed in the room before entrance. This process of repetitive recitation lasts for 12 hours and ends with the opening of the door. Extra Room is neither a prediction nor a proposal for a psychological strategy for the scenario of omnipresent mind reading technologies. It aims to create an analogy that refers to modern attempts to control the individual in psychological experiments by the military or through architecture. Architecture provided an adequate visual language, expressing the structural violence that would emerge in a situation where technology becomes potent enough to dissolve barriers between one s internal processes and the representation of one s self to others. Distorted in shape, the Extra Room is hidden away in the basement of a multi-story building and is both a shared space for all the inhabitants and 122

3 Extra Room Fig. 1 The mediatization of neuro-technologies. Fig. 2 The location of the Extra Room in the basement. socio Fig. 3 Tilted surfaces to prevent spatial orientation. Fig. 4 Complete darkness, sensory deprivation. Fig. 5 The Valve which provides liquid food. Fig. 6 The Extra Room s only amenity: a toilet. 123

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5 Extra Room 9 10 socio Fig. 7 Physical model: the Extra Room. Fig. 8 Physical model: the Extra Room s interior. Fig. 9 Physical model: the Valve. Fig. 10 Physical model: the Extra Room s toilet. 125

6 a space that plays a role in but does not belong to daily life. As Michel Foucault writes: There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places... which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites... are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. 7 thresholds 40 Many of these spaces exist and sometimes they become cultural icons like the garden shed in England, the fallout shelter in Switzerland, or the sauna in Finland, all of them Extra Rooms telling specific stories about the cultures in which they exist. 8 Endnotes *** Gunnar Green holds degrees from the Royal College of Art in London and the University of the Arts Berlin, and is a partner at TheGreenEyl with Willy Sengewald, Dominik Schumacher, Frédéric Eyl, and Richard The. He has been published and exhibited in Ars Electronica, Wired, and others. Bernhard Hopfengärtner holds degrees from the Royal College of Art in London and the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. His work has been exhibited at the Wellcome Trust in London, MoMA, and the National Museum of China in Beijing, among others. 1 Angela Saini, The Brain Police: Judging Murder with an MRI, Wired UK, June Adriana Stuijt, Brain Scan Replaces Job Interview in 5 Years? Next Nature (Blog), February 24, 2009, net/2009/02/brain-scan-replaces-job-interview-in-5-years/. 3 See Ervin Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (London: Penguin, 1990), See Tom Blanton, The CIA in Latin America, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book, no. 27, March 14, 2000, index.html. In particular, see Document 3 from the same site, CIA Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual (1983). 5 See Matthew Murphy, Glimpses of a Future Architecture, in Did Someone Say Participate? ed. Markus Miessen and Shumon Basar (Frankfurt: Revolver, 2006), See Jack A. Vernon, Inside the Black Room (New York: C. N. Potter, 1963), Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): Extra Room consists of a video, scale models, and photographs. The video is accessible online at com/ Through these media, it has been exhibited as part WHAT IF... at the Science Gallery in Dublin and Designed Disorder at the Center for Urban Built Environment in Manchester. It is ongoing and, currently, a one-to-one scale model of the Extra Room is in development. All images reproduced herein are courtesy of and copyright the authors. 126