THE EURYDICE EXPERIMENT
Employing diagrams, documents, texts, and models, The Eurydice Experiment explores a story of time travel to the past. In this fiction, the Spring Grove Psychiatric Research Center in Maryland developed a drug that gave patients’ access to their memory archive, allowing them to observe events from their personal past.
Through this narrative, Colwell questions our desire to revisit our personal histories, the potential repercussions of revisiting the past, and our conventional understanding of time.
The artwork uses the metaphor of the Greek myth of Eurydice and Orpheus as a way of reflecting upon our cultural aspirations to re-see or re-live the past and the problems of looking backwards.
Digital print, watercolor paint, pencil, Japanese tissue paper, galvanized steel, pages from the book The Pleasure of Ruins, cotton string, cardboard, copper, paper and acrylic paint.
Empleando diagramas, documentos, textos y maquetas, El experimento Eurídice explora una historia de ficción sobre un viaje en el tiempo al pasado. En esta ficción, el Centro de Investigación Psiquiátrica Spring Grove en Maryland desarrolló un experimento llamado Eurídice, en elque creó un medicamento que daba a los pacientes acceso a su archivo de memoria, permitiéndoles observar eventos en su pasado personal.
Con esta historia, Colwell cuestiona el deseo de volver a visitar nuestras historias personales, las repercusiones potenciales de volver al pasado, y nuestro entendimiento convencional del tiempo.
Esta obra de arte usa la metáfora del mito griego de Eurídice y Orfeo como un modo de reflexionar sobre nuestro deseo de volver a ver o revivir el pasado, así como los problemas de mirar hacia atrás.
Impresión digital, pintura acuarela, lápiz, papel de seda japonés, acero galvanizado, páginas del libro El placer de las ruinas, hilo de algodón, cartulina, cobre, papel y pintura acrílica.
The Eurydice Experiment studied what is popularly known as the amygdala's memory archive.
They made a drug, a tab like this, that chemically induced conscious access of an patient’s accumulated memories.
Most patients had a simple experience of traveling to the past, pleasantly observing an event or a person anew.
(A Diagram of simple travel to the past.)
But one exception was Patient O, who took the drug and returned to a memory of a family event. Everything was recognizable but on the television there was news of the fighting in a grand war she had never heard of.
(A Diagram of O’s travel to the past.)
The Eurydice doctors sent other members of O’s family back to their shared memory of the same event. They all reported news of a grand war that never took place that changed the world.
In other experiments O and other patients not only went to other, unlived pasts, but they also had memories of futures not yet lived. The patients became confused. What had they witnessed? Could they trust what they saw? How can multiple people have memories of a time unlived or not yet lived?
After fifty experiments the Human Studies Review Committee intervened and examined The Eurydice patient reports.
The results of Eurydice were never published but in the 1980s case studies began to circulate in academic communities. Physicists were especially interested. Some theorized that patient O and others had perhaps observed time in the block universe.
Many though that O’s experience could be an example of Everett’s many worlds theory of time.
Others concluded that Eurydice showed that time is not linear and that we carry with us memories of the future just like our memories of the past but we don’t recognize them as such.
