Diane Appaix Castro (she/her, @diappaix_art) is a 27 year old French and Spanish sculptor and installation artist who was born in Paris, France and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts from age four. Her work is strongly informed by her experience as an immigrant living at the intersection of three different cultures. Her works deal with the concepts of existence, humanity, presence - finding new ways to declare how we are in the world and leaving the door for possibilities elsewhere.

I’d like to talk a little more about the Ganzfeld experiment this week as I focused primarily on my project related to it. The Ganzfeld experiment was introduced to experimental psychology in the first half of the 20th century and has since been used as a pseudoscientific technique to test for ESP and telepathy. Although these are interesting aspects of the experiment, I am more interested in what the participant’s experience is like.

After explaining the experiment to an undergrad student at Tulane, she told me she wanted to try it herself a few weeks ago. I felt uncomfortable letting her do it on her own, so I offered to supervise. We set her up in a comfortable position, I placed halved ping pong balls over each of her eyes, headphones over her ears that played white noise, and projected a red light over her face. The experiment lasted 30 minutes. I filmed the whole thing.

When the 30 minutes were up, I turned the noise down slowly so as not to shock her, then turned the red light off. She smiled, and threw the headphones and ping pong balls off her head and said, “can we do that again some time?” She explained that there were times when she felt like she was spinning or could hear me talking, although I stayed completely silent. She also said that she saw things, shapes and movement.

This experiment is essentially a sensory-deprivation chamber that anyone with a bed, ping pong balls, and red light can recreate at home. What’s interesting is what the mind does when your senses are removed from you. My version of this experiment is to be your mind. I want to give you the auditory and visual “hallucinations” as a way to control the narrative and see what happens when multiple people experience the exact same thing. The Ganzfeld experiment only offers a platform for your mind to wander, but I wonder if it’s possible for me use this as an opportunity to give you information that cannot be deciphered.

By using the large sphere I’m hoping to better take over the participants periphery and use the sphere’s already echoey properties to obscure the sound. From my experience, it can feel as though the lights are both coming at you and from you, sometimes at the same time.

Most of the works I’ve been doing in my time at the MFA program have been about trying to break down our human-centric perspective. I believe that we have a deep desire to answer all of our questions but that not all of them can be answered, and that the uncertainty is the answer, and maybe even a healthy thing. It’s not because we have 5 senses and a brain that that is the best way to perceive the world and universe. For all we know, there are things around us that exist that we will never have the right equipment to perceive. This current project is another attempt to bring this idea forward. I’d love for the participant to leave the experience without a directly answered question, but a satisfaction with the unknown.