Mental Mapping explores how internal networks, such as memory, perception, and emotion, shape the way we experience and navigate the world. This exhibition delves into the intersections of neuroscience, creativity, and visual storytelling.

Reception: April 24, 2025, 6:30-8:30 PM

Artist Talk: June 10, 2025, 6-8 PM

Location: The Somerville Armory
191 Highland Ave, Somerville, MA

Admission is free.

Joshua Sariñana’s latest research, Neural Synchrony of Minds and Machines: Hippocampal Mechanisms to Advance AI and Virtual Networks, has been published in Leonardo, the leading peer-reviewed journal on the intersection of science, technology, and the arts. Read the Paper »

Spark, With Nora Young, by CBC Radio explores how neuroscience and technology intersect to enhance our understanding of memory. Joshua Sariñana explains how memory engrams—networks of neurons encoding experiences—can be visualized and artificially activated using advanced techniques like optogenetics.

This Roundtable discussion explores the intersections of neuroscience, art, artificial intelligence, and memory through a collaborative discussion featuring a choreographer, designer/artist, an environment and community organizer, and neuroscientists. The conversation highlights Joshua Sariñana's Mental Mapping project, which visualizes the connections between our internal cognitive networks and external environments by using photography, storytelling, and AI tools.

The podcast episode of Culture Matters at the Urban Media Art studio features Joshua Sariñana discussing his project Mental Mapping: The Art of Exploring Connections, which bridges neuroscience, visual art, and AI to examine how individuals connect their internal experiences with their external environments.

Joshua Sariñana’s article in MIT Technology Review analyzes the work of filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri, whose art addresses themes of historical trauma, memory, and colonization. Sariñana explores how Sanzgiri leverages both digital tools, like 3D scanning and physical manipulation of 16mm film to examine the geopolitics of his ancestral home in Goa, India, and the lasting impact of colonial histories.

This WIRED interview between Joshua Sariñana and Sinead Bowell explores the digital afterlife. They discuss the interplay between neuroscience, technology, and memory, discussing how advancements in understanding and manipulating memories could impact science, medicine, and identity. Joshua Sariñana highlights the potential of technologies like AI and neurotechnologies to reconstruct, externalize, and even upload memories, raising ethical concerns about privacy, equity, and data bias.

Joshua Sariñana, PhD, contributes his expertise in neuroscience and photography to the documentary In an Instant, which examines the evolving role of photography in memory and identity. Sariñana discusses how the overwhelming volume of digital images challenges our ability to process and retain memories, as the act of capturing and viewing photographs becomes increasingly disconnected. Drawing parallels between analog and digital photography, he highlights how physical media, like Polaroid film, fosters a tactile and emotional connection that modern digital platforms often lack.

In a conversation with Michael Kirchoff, Joshua Sariñana discusses the intersection of neuroscience and photography, revealing how his dual background informs his creative process.

Joshua Sariñana’s photographic series Prosopagnosia is a profound exploration of memory, identity, and the nature of perception. Featured in SciArt Magazine, this body of work employs a circular frame to create a telescopic effect, visually symbolizing the distortion and reconstruction of past experiences.

Joshua Sariñana’s photographic series Prosopagnosia was exhibited at The Griffin@Digital Silver Imaging, a satellite gallery of The Griffin Museum of Photography, from October 4 to December 1, 2016. This deeply personal collection explores themes of memory, identity, and emotion through imagery that reflects on Sariñana’s early adulthood experiences of love, wonder, and isolation. Using circular, telescopic frames as a metaphor for fragmented memory, the series confronts the inaccuracies of recollection, revealing how memories evolve each time they are recalled.

In a 2015 interview with the Impossible Project (now Polaroid Originals), Joshua Sariñana, PhD, reflects on how his neuroscience expertise and photographic practice intersect to explore memory, identity, and the human experience.

Photography, Memory, and the Future explores how photography serves as a bridge between memory and imagination, grounding the past while shaping our understanding of the future. It highlights the inaccuracies of human memory and the role of photographs as stable placeholders for recalling personal and collective histories. Discussing the brain's visual and memory systems, the lecture delves into the hippocampus's integration of space and time for episodic memory, emphasizing that individuals with memory deficits cannot imagine future scenarios without visual aids. Through examples from iconic photographs to neuroscientific insights, the lecture underscores the emotional, societal, and personal significance of photography in memory formation and its transformative potential for envisioning the future.