Exterior reality reflects the interior. This relationship can extend in both directions. At home we may surround ourselves with significant objects and build our spaces into extensions of our mental states -- attics of memory, basements of the subconscious, rooms housing hopes, desires, and practical working recall. Conversely, city planning and civic architecture have long been tools to shape the psyches of their inhabitants from the top down, to utopian or dystopian purpose. But how is the mind itself structured? What can be observed from outside? Its complexity defies analogy, but we try anyway -- neurons may be forests of interlocked branches, interconnected circuits become labyrinths, the optic lobe the ultimate movie theater. This month's issue explores the dual subjects of psychology and architecture, winding through asylums and laboratories, family homes and crumbling apartment blocks that nonetheless nurture dreams. The design of our environments is inherently connected to and expressed by our thinking. Sometimes, inner and outer worlds may be the same.
What was once a simple, Spartan hut in wood and metal sheeting, designed to shelter passing climbers, has today become a cutting edge structure. New forms of architecture high in the mountains seek a strong relationship with the landscape, deliberately contrasting with the environment, to the extent
When we lived in the house it was surrounded by forest, with a long unpaved driveway leading through the woods to the school bus stop. The history of the house was palpable. Growing up, my sisters and I heard voices, saw lights and dreamed of other beings. My mother and I shared a recurring dream of
Where is there to belong to? To not feel strange? To not ask permission? Ground. Home. A familiar land. Une Terre Familière is structured as a series of long-take vignettes, each centered around a site purposing a collision of nature and artifice. Within highly manicured environments, these s
Wandering through the body puzzling out a system of symbols. The trouble is, affect resists signification outright. The inside and outside become muddled when you start to feel your body in relation to the image. This film is an exploration of the body, specifically the affective register of bodily
There was once a man who lived inside a computer. This is no urban fairytale, this is a meditative documentary about Dave Fischer. Fischer is a computer animator, retro-computing fanatic and friendly enigma. This nine minute work lets the audience in on his daily life (and his computer), showing you
The setting: a mental hospital in Evreux on the eve of its demolition. Reshuffling the cards by disconnecting pictures from sound, edited with partial synchronisation, Quentin Brière Bordier focuses on the sounds of material life. The snapping of the barber's scissors, the purring of an elect
With Mind Frame , Jake Fried focuses on removing "overt symbolism and iconography" in order to concentrate on what he calls the "flesh—human experience and expression." Hand-drawn animation with ink, white-out and coffee. More at inkwood.net
Through the vehicle of human subject neuroscience experiments, Apparatus Synapse explores attention, distraction and presence. A series of individuals are viewed as they engage in experiments, feeding data into machines under demanding conditions in which they are often heavily tasked. The camera is
'The movements of a music box ballerina are reinterpreted in a groundbreaking video for British composer Ryan Teague using electromegnetic fields, sub zero temperatures and 2000 volts of electricity.' Directed and Produced by Craig Ward D.O.P - Jason Tozer Crystal cultivation, experimentation and ph
The majestic sanatorium looms at the top of a mountain ledge by the beautiful Lustrafjord in Sogn og Fjordane. The isolated building is on the verge of falling apart and is under threat of demolition. The building's past as a tuberculosis sanatorium, psychiatric hospital and refugee centre is portra
Animals and plants can produce amazing materials such as spider webs, wood or bone using only a few raw materials available. How do they achieve this? And what can engineers learn from them?
Summoned to a remote warehouse by the enigmatic Fermat, four brilliant mathematicians are given pseudonyms -- Galois, Hilbert, Olivia and Pascal -- and tasked with solving highly complex numerical riddles. As the apparent strangers struggle to solve the puzzles and determine why they are there, the
A journey to the threshold of a utopian labyrinth. We follow the perspective of Aria End, a custodian with cyborg guts, tasked with cleaning up this feral structure.
A spy's journey from the NSA to a covert facility in downtown Manhattan. A top-secret handbook takes viewers on an undercover journey to TITANPOINTE, the site of a hidden partnership. Narrated by Rami Malek and Michelle Williams, and based on classified NSA documents, Project X reveals the inner wor
Thought Broadcasting is a film about psychosis and surveillance. A hybrid documentary, the film draws upon real-life accounts of a schizophrenic disorder: the belief that one's thoughts are being transmitted and heard by others. Set against the proliferation of mobile phone masts in the urban and ru
Radix is a wooden root sculpture augmented by projection and sound. The sculpture is brought to life as a fictive entity: part organism, part apparatus. In an ongoing play of light and sound the object undergoes a metamorphosis from its initial natural shape towards a technical formation while the t
Synopsis: The Near Life Experience might seem to be an odd, extraordinary occurrence, but in fact it can happen to anyone. Why to be the self-stigma of your fixed, unchanging identity, as if we were never to act, never to desire, never to experience anything new? Now we can give you the most preciou
Amygdala is a scientific tale. Located deep inside the temporal lobe of the human brain, a small almond-shaped region orchestrates our emotional life. This is the amygdala, which is an ancient biology that deciphers whether an experience is emotionally traumatic or merely anxiety-ridden. It structur
Youri is twenty years old. He lives with his mother in Ivry, the city where he grew up. But his apartment complex is to be demolished and the scene of his childhood dreams will disappear. How will he lift off without a spaceship?
Begun in 2009, Bluebrain is director Noah Hutton's 10-year film-in-the-making that chronicles the twists and turns of the Blue Brain Project —neuroscientist Henry Markram's audacious and controversial attempt to reverse-engineer a human brain, neuron by neuron, in a massive virtual simulation
Disillusioned with his life in the suburbs of segregated Beirut, Omar's discovery lures him into the depth of the city. Immersed into a world that is so close yet so isolated from his reality, he eventually loses track and finds himself struggling to keep his attachments, his sense of home.
The End of Sitting is an installation at the crossroads of visual art, architecture, philosophy and empirical science. In our society almost the entirety of our surroundings have been designed for sitting, while evidence from medical research suggests that too much sitting has adverse health effects