Title: Insofern

With its 10 billion nervous cells, the brain is the most complex of living tissues. The brain plays a major role in the functioning of the human body: it commands the body's motility as well as its psyches and its metabolism. The brain's mechanism can be represented by a highly complex addition and correlation of logical and mathematical systems. In illustration of this, during the brain's development, genes contained in its cells determine the role of each neurone, which in turn will interconnect and organise themselves to form a neuronal network capable of managing the behaviour of the organism. The structure of these systems was the driver in a number of mathematical and logical models leading to progress in areas as diverse as medicine, computer sciences or telecommunications.

Although strongly influenced by recent discoveries in the field of bioinformatics, the approach taken by Cod.Act does not propose an abstract and indirect application of genetic algorithms or neuronal networks, but rather a physical and tangible representation of the action of genes on an organism. The scanner ]insofern[ explores matter. It offers to visitors a sensory experience at the heart of an organic universe in constant activity. It takes the visitor right there where the genome is expressed and synapses expand.

Cod.Act, has developed a mobile scanner with which one can explore the depth of a synthetic human brain. Isolated in a room, at close quarters with the brain, a visitor embarks on a visual and acoustic incursion in a animated and translucent universe. As the scanner hovers over the brain, its light beam stimulates areas of the brain, which enter into motion, dilate and produce sounds. The brain releases fragments of information trapped within its tissues, traces of past sensory contacts with the external world. By simultaneous re-transmition of the scanning operation, the individual adventure reaches beyond the confines of the room and becomes accessible to the outside world.