A Time Atelier (Art, Neuroscience, and Time Slippage)

• In Event: Injury and Invisibility: Empiricism and Anti-Empiricism in Knowing Damage and Regeneration - II

Abstract

Time slips, slides, recedes. Memory loss, déjà vu, confusion, confabulation, hallucinatory visions and sounds of the temporal. Traces of the past, visions of the future, and perception of the now embedded and constantly reconfiguring in our consciousness 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, this project explores the productive tensions in the experiences of time and memory of those living with brain injuries through a multimedia time atelier. It 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.
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? How might we describe those slips in time which are imperceptible and beyond language? How can we understand these memory changes if we engage ethnography as a theoretically informed arts practice, guided by imaginative and aesthetic experimentations in both research and representation? As an ethnographic multimedia installation, this paper is a type of curatorial intervention into time, memory and forgetfulness. 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, might challenge those traditional neuroimages.

Author

• denielle a elliott, York University