Teresa Wennberg

In 2000, the ICC InterCommunication Center in Tokyo invited Wennberg to create a new virtual reality. She chose to build a metaphor for the brain, an organ she describes as ‘extremely refined and at the same time quite mechanical,’ and one that, like a computer, opens and closes doors and buzzes with orders and counter-orders. Brainsongs is organised into seven visual worlds based on three of the brain’s most important functions: short-term memory and executive decision-making, the recognition of faces and objects, and how we behave in space. At the time, virtual reality could only be built with tools such as Maya, Alias Wavefront, OpenGL and C++, with ‘no AI helpers.’ Drawing on her background as a painter, Wennberg devoted great energy to colour, form, textures and transparencies, and the work took about a year to complete. It was shown at ICC in 2001 and at KTH Stockholm in 2001 and 2004. It is part of her long search to understand ‘our mysterious brain’ and how ‘lucid memories can turn into amnesia.’