Denielle Elliott and Michelle Charette
This is a magic atelier — a multimodal compendium of sounds, biographies, videos, artefacts, and images providing summaries, partial accounts, the forgotten, and counter-knowledge on the ephemeral, hallucinatory, and time slippage in the injured mind.
The long term goal is that the listener/viewer/participant might also feel or experience some of what it is like to live with an injured mind.
We are trying to imagine ways of sharing traces of the past, visions of the future, and perception of the now as our memories reconfigure in our consciousness, and as our neurons and synapses fire, misfire, and regenerate. How can we understand these hidden, ephemeral time travels as the mind plays tricks with our memories? Understanding memories as temporal practice, we explore the productive tensions in the experiences of time and memory of those living with brain injuries through a multimedia time atelier. Our encyclopedia aims to represent the multisensorial experience of these memory slippages as lived by artists/scholars with memory disorders and brain injuries and as represented by neuroscientists – through sound, film, images, creative writing, and performance. Informed by the work of Lauren Berlant, specifically her “sensing of history” and her attention to “affective intensities,” we suggest this methodological experiment as a way to get at the inner transformations resulting from memory changes, that is the state of ‘being otherwise’.
Brain injuries not only result in structural changes in neuro matter, but they can change the self in profound and unexpected ways. How might we get at the multisensorial, affective experiences of living with an injured mind? And how do we portray those slips in time which are imperceptible and beyond written text? Here we suggest through a multisensorial ethnography if we approach ethnography as a theoretically informed arts practice, guided by imaginative and aesthetic experimentations in both research and representation. As an ethnographic multimodal and multisensorial installation, this is meant to be a type of curatorial intervention into time, forgetfulness, and neurology. Subverting the neurological case, the atelier forces us to consider the limitations of neuroscientific digital renderings of the brain and how art, through its power to move us.
This digital atelier is presented as a ‘magic encyclopedia’ (inspired by Walter Benjamin and Michael Taussig) – 12 multimodal entries — that showcases a range of transdisciplinary artistic, creative nonfiction, and ethnographic representations of neurological expertise, our experience of time, and memory slippages caused by neurological conditions of the injured brain.
