Phrenology investigates the relationship between memory, writing and the perception of space, though writings created by incarcerated women. A web component consists of a series of 360 degree photographic panorama that interconnect through text written by women in a workshop at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. The photographic panoramas serve as visual analogies to the writing. Viewers move through the different environments to read the women’s writing in a form of spatial poem, accompanied by an experimental sound track composed by Paul Geluso. A second online component will be created in Second Life, where anyone experiencing isolation would be welcome to create a module of the poem to share their experiences. A third version will be created as a video installation, with the camera floating through the environments in series as they might appear chronologically in the life of the writer, accompanied by a 5.1 surround sound track of the women reading along with ambient sound.

Phrenology was a Victorian pseudo-science of the brain, that claimed to map one’s personality according to the topography of their skull. If the psyche could be charted physically, then its alteration after a period of emotional stress could also be seen as the erosion of a physical landscape.

The project was supported by a 2007 harvestworks.org residency and 2007 rhizome.org commission.