SNN#1 – The Speed of Thought Itself @ IMPAKT Festival 2019
Performance by Chris Salter and Alexandre Saunier
IMPAKT Festival
Utrecht, Netherlands
Curator: Jan Adriaans
October 30, 2019: 19:15/21:45/22:30

 

SNN#1 is an experimental thirty-minute audio/visual performance using spiking neural network algorithms. It explores how we increasingly give over our thinking processes to machines. The performance takes its form from the 19th century Utrecht-based physiologist Frans Donders’ experiments in measuring the reaction time between stimulus and response in order to calculate the speed of mental processes – no less than the speed of thought. Mixing matter, signs, voice, light, sound and time together, the performance reminds us that the history of experimentation in the physiological and psychological laboratories of the past and present is itself a history of human voices and bodies interfaced with and inscribed by machines.