Terra Nullius/Nobody’s Land: Excavation from Image 3.0
Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa

JUSTINE EMARD
Neurosynchronia, 2021

This video installation explores the origins of images in our minds and how we are able to manifest these in dreamlike states, via the elision of computer technics and the signals generated by the human brain. Neurosynchronia is inspired by the ‘utopian environments’ created by autodidacts in the early twentieth century. Through a neural interface projected on a screen, the viewer experiences a virtual ecosystem generated through impulses triggered when he/she wears a wired headpiece – a digital tracking device that the artist developed with neuroscientists – thatbrings into view an interaction between the visual cortex and a virtual transmission. Contingent on the viewer’s attention, each moment is transformed in real time; the viewer has the capacity to recalibrate images, thus changing the course of the perceptual journey, and able to create an inner cinematic universe through imaginatively reconfiguring sensory data. The work pays homage to and confirms the remarkable potential of our neuroplasticity, the remarkable property that permits us to alter and repair existent neuronal pathways, and etch new synaptic connections within our cerebral tissue.