Einstein’s Brain

The paper presents an overview of the Einstein’s Brain Project, a work that examines the idea of the world as a construct sustained through the neurological processes contained within the brain. What is suggested is that the world is not some reality outside ourselves, but, is the result of an interior process that makes and sustains our body image and its relationship to a world, and that the investigation of virtual reality and its accompanying social space is an exploration of the construction of consciousness. Einstein’s Brain is a collaborative work that explores the notion of the brain as a real and metaphorical interface between bodies and worlds in motion. The work comprises several developing projects, including CD-ROMs, film and most particularly immersive VR. Each version has at its core landscapes digitally generated from neuro-physiological and topographical maps and dxf models of the human body and brain which are rendered and organized so as to provide familiar, yet unnamable, highly-detailed naturalistic navigable landscapes. This presentation will focus on two aspects of the project: the development of the worlds as states rather than objects, and the use of VR as an illuminating perceptual filter.