Anna Hyrkkänen: Expanded reality

Expanded reality is an installation work which focuses on the delicate balance of body awareness. Body awareness refers to our experience of being conscious of our body and all its parts. Body awareness is created in the brain by combining information produced by the organs controlling our sense of sight, touch, and balance. The brain compiles the information into models that produce our experience of our body. If an error occurs while compiling this information, we may experience unusual sensations. The most extreme of these is the out-of-body experience. The strange sensations include feeling like parts of your body are stretching or shrinking, like your leg does not belong to you or like you have a third arm sticking out of your chest. According to current knowledge, the sensations occurring in an out-of-body experience are based on the connection between our mental images and the available sensory information. Due to the vast processing capacity of the brain, the new vision seems completely believable and the sensation of levitating feels very authentic. The neural matrix we live in is stretched and shaped according to the situation.