An Ecology of Mind, video installation, Calit2 at UC San Diego (2019)


This installation is the compiled documentation of thirty-two individuals immersed inside of a hole in the ground as part of an investigation of the co-emergent relationship between body, mind, and world, and the recursive notion of matter thinking about matter thinking about matter. While the body is undergoing a hyper-sensory experience, the resulting image isolates a disembodied head or continually rendering consciousness. The structure in the center of the room is influenced by the Chomskyan concept of a universal grammar, a fractal structure inside the brain that predefines the grammatical rules of language. A muffled sound of compiled voices of participants and a DMT activation frequency emanate from the dirt mound inside the structure, while the larger space is filled with ambient nature sounds recorded at the site of the hole.