Brent Coughenour

Building on research by Diana Deutsch, Alfred Bregman, Maryanne Amacher and others, The Sick Sense is an ongoing project exploring the limits of the perceptual system. These projects stimulate otoacoustic and flicker phenomena and auditory and visual hallucinations while searching for stimulus patterns that deactivate the brain’s default mode network, switching the brain into the role of ecstatic perceiver.

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approx. 25 minutes

Wherein, while seeking the annihilation of the self at the boundaries of the perceptual system through a mechanism comprising grid patterns controlled by banks of sine waves, we discover otoacoustic and flicker phenomena—auditory and visual hallucinations which deactivate the brain’s default mode network (DMN), resulting in the ecstatic euphoria reserved for the beatific.

approx. 15 minutes
Phasing, color blending modes and the verbal transformation effect combine to create a sensory overload spurring a variety of auditory and visual hallucinatory phenomena and depth illusions, a series of techniques clinically proven to have salutary effects on depression, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, chronophobia, and other maladies of the mind.

approx. 20 minutes

“During a sunny afternoon foray spent gamboling along the thresholds of flicker fusion and the auditory fusion frequency, I discovered, for the first time, ways to bring all properties [i.e., timbre, pitch, intensity, and duration] under a single control in order to create a total serialism of the mind, a sort of psychophysiological gesamtkunstwerk in which the fabric of time is rolled up like a rug, rotated, cut into sections, taken out of doors to be cleaned slice by slice, then reassembled into its previous totality and unrolled, once again seamlessly blanketing the surface of our conscious reality.” -Karlheinz Stockhausen

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Brent Coughenour is a media artist originally from the Motor City, currently based in the Golden State, whose most recent work incorporates computer programming for live manipulation of sound and image. He has presented his work at a variety of festivals and venues throughout the U.S. and internationally and is distributed by Video Data Bank.