Initial Chronogram: Film, narrative and plans

Baroque Brain Library

The brain's plasticity means that at any time our behaviour and experiences are shaping our experience of reality. We experience our environment through a complex set of actions and translations and processes in our brain. We form a giant mental map which is comprised of both our innate predispostions towards what is most likely, (things like shadows are formed underneath objects due to the postion of the sun above the earth) and learned rules of probability. At every moment of our lives our brain is measuring the information our senses is giving it against its internal mental map. It is constantly updating itself and correcting and shifting itself according to our experience.

What is most interesting is that we in fact have no direct relationship with the reality we assume we live in. We communicate with the outside world and experience it solely through the organ of the brain which does so by a continual series of processes, computing and sorting sensory inputs into a legible and tangible output.

Most of the time, this experience is seamless and we are blissfully unaware of this overwhelmingly delicate and complex process, however like all systems there can be glitches, times when simple processes become interrupted or overly charged and suddenly, our usual reality is sparked into fantastical realms.

It could be claimed that we can start to understand our experience of reality - space, enviroment, time by looking at these glitches as they provide the best place to note the processes that are occuring.

I am working on a project which hopes to address the nature of our relationship to reality through the grand machine that is our brain.

I am representing the process as a giant, infinite library, one where information is taken in, stored, sorted and distributed. One which has areas of private storage, archived journals, secret old historical volumes and lighter, daily borrowed books. This building is only formed by the route that a user takes through it, like the brain, the routes and paths that are used become stronger and from them new neural channels are formed in turn.

The building like an ancient city that has been discovered will have parts that have faded away and others which are still rich and detailed in experience, these factors depend entirely on the protagonist who inhabits the building alone.

The project will be realised as a building through drawings but also as a film, which will explore the temporal nature of its experience. In it the protagonist moves through chambers of the library, interacting with it and simultaneously finding an alterego self in a separate contrasting space. Gradually as the film unfolds, we the viewer will realise that the library and the protagonists interaction with it is producing the experience of her doppelganger in the 'other' space.

The film hopes to explore the relationships between production, control, communication and experience.

The library takes in an input, processes it and produces a controlled output which in turn creates the reality of the other space. The project hopes to explore how far these relationships can be pulled and distorted before reality itself stops existing in a known form.