The Speculative Realities Lab
The SpecLab is a space connecting neurosurgery, anthropology, and the immersive arts. It contributes to expanding their respective disciplinary equipment – conceptual, material, and digital – in order to animate brain-related knowledge for navigation, prediction, and inspiration. We want to make neurosurgery appear strange again in order to unsettle certain status quo of the clinical practice.
There are two ways through which the speculative can be understood and put into use at this crossroads of neurosurgery and anthropology. First, we want to explore future navigation models within brain data by engaging with immersive arts and alternative human-machine interaction models, such as sketching interfaces and interactive virtual reality environments. For this, we are committing to develop an emergent learning community with the Berlin-based creative coding and artistic scene, learning from brain imaging practices and neuro-navigation by staging immersive installations. Second, we are committing to explore the plurality of the ways to know and to act in neuro-clinical settings. There, notions of scientific rigor and precision mingle with talent, humility, and charisma; randomized studies cohabit with hand sketches; dry statistics and indicators are brought into the same paragraph with eloquent discourses on struggle and personal growth. Besides, beyond being considered as research objects, brains and nerves are often given the status of active partners in these practices, subduing our idea of the human subject on both sides of the scalpel.
What if it wasn’t all science, but also an art — with perhaps a twist of magic? By bringing the notion of experience back to the core of neurosurgical practices, in particular in training, planning, and developing treatments, the Speculative Realities Lab aims at creating other frameworks to leverage intellectual and artistic conversations between neurosurgery and anthropology, inviting design, computer science, and environmental science to the table.