David Byrne and Mala Gaonkar

The Institute Presents: Neurosociety, created by David Byrne and Mala Gaonkar, guides visitors through an interactive, immersive theatrical performance inspired and informed by neuroscientific experiments. Visitors become participants; their activity responses inform spontaneous discussions regarding personal bias and perception. The experience unfolds over the course of four rooms that each address different types of experiments. The experiences playfully demonstrate how our biases affect our moral behavior and connections with others and reveal how our preconceived ideas impact our decisions. Unified Field collaborated closely with the creative team to turn their ideas into technology that enables engaging, interrogatory experiences: designing interfaces in response to early script readings, addressing challenges in previous performance iterations, and creating systems that the team could iterate with to optimize performances. Unified Field built all of the programs and systems and designed interfaces for all of the devices and visualization methods that present activities and their reflected responses.