This image of my brain house is an architectural rendering that will serve as a guide as I construct a model of the brain house this semester. Each area of the house corresponds to an area and/or function of the human brain: The dug out basement represents the brain stem where basic functions such as temperature regulation and hunger are managed. This basement will be muddy and murky, surrounded by water and cold. It will contain an ancient furnace and some buried memories, obscured on purpose or unconsciously but not forgotten. The first floor of the brain house contains the swollen ballroom of perception where day dreams, fantasies, ideas, thoughts, and memories are played out and played with. The second and third floors contain visual information gathering centers where telescopes face out to the world, and information is stored with motion picture film. Projectors will line the walls shooting bits of images towards a grid which represents the way visual information is gathered through the eyes and pieced together in the brain. There will also be an audio collection area filled with porcupine arrangements of microphones and wind catchers directing sonic information into systems of tubes and tape recorders. The dumb waiter in the center is the distribution machine, the only means by which information and people move within the structure (other than the occasional disappearance/teleportation/etc). The large transparent tube that twists from attic to basement represents the nervous system. It will be filled with water and phosphorescent jellyfish, sparking with electrical energy. The attic is the memory bank: File cabinets stuffed to the brim with still images, cans of motion picture film, tiny music boxes containing every element of every sound this brain's user remembers hearing, swatches of every touched texture remembered, tiny jars filled with every remembered smell, and a closet packed with more ethereal stored sensations: those that rise the hair on the back of the neck, elicit a sudden gasp, an embarrassing laugh or the tear that gives you away.
Norman Klein
Spaces Between
Viralnet.net asked cultural critic and author Norman Klein to compose a narrative that could reside 'within' Drew Denny's Brain House. As you scroll over the various rooms of the Brain House the narrative 'Spaces Between' will reveal itself in the form of twenty-five aphorisms that are hidden throughout the house.