SYNCHRONICITY

SHOWN AT

Hyperfest by MIT MEDIALAB , 12/11/2021 , 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM EST

Overview

Hallucinations are defined as an incoluntary percept-like experience in the absence of an appropriate direct stimulus(Betall,1990),However, very little is known about the mechanisms underlying hallucinations, they stay mysterious till now.

Synchronicity is a generated "ensemble", an experimental art piece about hallucination. It's a playful journey into the inner workings of the mind. Inspired by " Ganzfeld Experiment : sensory deprivation hallucinations", we tried to reveal the "mind" by having experiencer closed eyes and exposed to a flickering light.

Three groups of people were included in the show: the experiencer, the performancers, and the audience. Musical instruments performancers would follow the virtual conductor on screen, while the live scoring/ conducting is affeted by the bio-signals of the "experiencer".

TEAM

MY ROLE

TIME LINE

Xiaofei Hong GSD MDes Tech 2022

Javier Aguera Reneses MIT IDM 2022

Mateo Larrea Ferro Berkelee Undergraduate 2022

Chen Liu Berkelee Undergraduate 2022

Bilkent Sam Berkelee Undergraduate 2022

Concept Development

C# Programming

Unity implementation

Visual Design

11/2021 - 12/2021

it begins with the light
light as the key into the mind of the experiencer
light as the guide inside

SYNCHRONICITY

is about following the path that the light reveals
to then respectfully show what it shows

Research Background

The ganzfeld effect happens when your brain is starved of visual stimulation and fills in the blanks on its own. This changes your perception and causes unusual visual and auditory patterns. It can even lead to hallucinations.

Psychologist Wolfgang Metzger introduced the concept of the ganzfeld effect in 1930. “Ganzfeld” is a German word that means “whole field.” It refers to an unstructured, uniform space covering your entire visual field.

Experiments on the ganzfeld effect have been used to investigate telepathy and hallucinatory states. Some people do it just for the experience.

Illustration by Ruth Basagoitia

"Visual hallucinations can be induced in the normal population by visual flicker, limited to an annulus that constricts content complexity to simple moving grey blobs, allowing objective mechanistic investigation.A neural field model with motion selectivity provides a mechanism for both hallucinations and perception. Our results demonstrate that hallucinations can be studied objectively, and they share multiple mechanisms with sensory perception. We anticipate that this assay will be critical to test theories of human consciousness and clinical models of hallucination."

(Sensory dynamics of visual hallucinations in the normal population, eLife 2016;5:e17072 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.17072)