Brain Index, a twenty-four-foot-high digital art installation on the ground floor of the Jerome L. Greene Science Center, invites visitors to peer inside the brain and also to meet the neuroscientists who are working upstairs to unravel its complexities. Looped images of the brain are spliced between profiles of Zuckerman Institute researchers, and interactive panels guide viewers through each scientist’s area of expertise. “We’re trying to make the science in the building accessible and personal, and at the same time communicate how much we have yet to learn,” says Laura Kurgan ’88GSAPP, a Columbia architecture professor who spent three years working on the project with Mark Hansen, a Columbia journalism professor and data specialist. “The moving screens map the research taking place in the building and, like opening doors, invite the public to step in and explore.”
