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Open Mind/ Marcos Lutyens
(RES magazine January/February, 2004)

Los Angeles based intermedia artist Marcos Lutyens is shedding light on the term headspace. The 38-year-old European native's work exists on a plane between the architectural and the subconscious. A participant in three Venice Biennales, Lutyens is currently working on a book to be published mid-year by Papadakis Publisher. Mindbrowser: Architectures of the Mind, will showcase three of the artist's current inter-related media projects, focusing on the title namesake Mindbrowser (which he collaborated on with inter-media artist Oliver Hess), as well as Second Skin and Cychopolis.

Mindbrowser is a CD-Rom game that is inspired by Carl Jung's explorations of the subconscious, as well as the surrealist game 'The Exquisite Corpse.' Four players are navigated by audio suggestion into architectural spaces in their minds and asked to add their personal accounts to an evolving verbal collage.

For Second Skin, Lutyens and his colleagues began by inducing a trance in selected architectural and professional students from around the world. "We asked them to imagine themselves growing into a dwelling, to build an archetypal structure," he explains. They input all the data on the structures and averaged it via a genetic algorithm program, in order to establish patterns of convergence among the different forms.

Cychopolis took place in Sardinia, where 30 engineering students were given the task of mapping a city from a sensorial point of view. The map would, for example, interactively expand or contract depending on individuals' emotional responses to the 180 selected locations. Lutyens summarizes the book project: "Mind Browser is the architecture of the mind. Second Skin is the mind as architecture. And Cychopolis is the mind as city." (www.lutyens.net)

-Shana Ting Lipton
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