IT'S ALL SALT
Project status and description:
It’s All Salt is a proposed concept for an installation at Burning Man 2024.
It’s All Salt was an art installation at Burning Man 2024. It stood ~3.5m tall and 5m long. It burned on Thursday, August 29t at midnight.
It’s All Salt was composed of CNC-cut sagittal and coronal slices from MRI scans of 9 different people. With this project, we wanted to produce a unified representation of an often isolating event: imaging of the brain in an attempt to understand a symptom, behavior or experience of unknown origin. This relied on participation and collaboration with community members who shared their MRI scans with us.
To all of those who generously shared their brains, and stories, to help us create this sculpture: Thank you so very much for being a part of It’s All Salt!
In this project, we used a variety of neuroimaging tools, including FreeSurfer’s SynthSR and recon-all, as well as FSL’s FAST.
Project inspiration:
What is your relationship with your brain? Do you cherish all that it enables you to do?
Engage, feel, move, breathe.
Do you struggle with the multiplicity of experience?
Empathy, expectation, fear, doubt.
Underlying the richness of all that we do, the brain and mind operate in multiscale, complex patterns that even neuroscientists are only beginning to explore. Whether you study the brain, explore conscious states, admire all that it subserves, or battle often with your mind; when it seems overwhelming, impossible to understand - you might find solace in one simplicity:
it’s all salt.
Our brains, and thus all that they underlie, depend on the balance of these soluble, tiny ions to function.
Every impulse, every signal.
Our installation invites participants to explore the intricacies and unknowns of the human brain by literally climbing through the peaks (gyri) and valleys (sulci) of brain “tissue”. As you wander through the wooden brain, light, sound, and text will serve as tools - encouraging you to reflect on the complexities of the brain and mind, as well as the variability of human experiences. We aim to capture the duality of the brain’s intricate functions and its fundamental reliance on simple elements like sodium, potassium, calcium, and chloride. This principle unifies the immeasurable variety and diverseness of human experience.
Thank you to those who have already been a part of the conceptualization stage and those who have expressed interest in our project, or in sharing their MRI scans with us. If you would like to share your brain MRI scan to be used in our installation, follow this link to get started.
