On September 17th, Samon and I gave a performative online presentation at the DNArchi conference titled «Conception & Emotion, Physiology, neurocognition» for which we re-activated a dormant artistic research project that Samon started in 1999: The Neurhome. It consists of an imagined future, in which our habitation is able to anticipate and act on all our needs and requests: from kinetic changes of the house’s inside and outside morphology, to 5D food printing and mnemonic projection. Twenty years later, in the era of the Internet of Things, many of his ideas have either become a reality, or at least seem tantalizingly close.
Samon unearthed many of the original ideas, revisioned them, and together we reviewed them in the light of contemporary knowledge and neuroscientific discoveries. We also further expanded the network of architectural, historical, philosophical and ethical concepts that the Neurhome evokes. We enjoyed working on the project together, and will continue to do so, as we feel we only touched the surface. We were also happy to see that our presentation was received enthusiastically, as it touched many of the topics discussed by the previous speakers in both a poetic and scientific manner. In fact, we were happily surprised that one of the speakers is using the EEGsynth!
As part of our presenation, we created a short movie that gives a more impressionistic take some of our ideas, as well as allowing the audience (and us) a moment of quiet contemplation on the future of neuro-responsive architecture.
We will be developing the project into several papers in the near future, starting with an article in DNArchi in which we will introduce the main innovative concepts that the Neurhome introduces: the Volumor and the Building-Person-Interface. For now, we would like to thank Julie Milovanovic, Elodie Hochscheid, Joaquim Silvestre, and Louis Vitalis for their invitation and enthousiastic support, and the other speakers for their engagement and interesting discussions.