Synaptic Echoes: Traces of Presence in a Responsive Environment

Synaptic Echoes is an interactive installation that explores co-creation as a shared, bodily, and temporal process between human participants and a responsive technical system. The work is designed as a relational environment that senses, registers, and gradually transforms through interaction.

Central to the project is a three-layer memory model: immediate response, temporal echo, and long-term trace. These structures how audiovisual behaviour accumulates and decays. This temporal design encourages participants to linger, adjust, and attune to the environment rather than seek control or resolution. As multiple bodies enter the space, co-creation becomes collective, emerging through shared presence rather than individual authorship.

Synaptic Echoes invites reflection on how meaning, agency, and memory can arise through affective and embodied encounters with technology. The work proposes an alternative model of human-machine interaction, one grounded in attunement, duration, and relational experience.

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Golnoush Mirsalari is a Toronto-based designer, artist, and researcher working with interactive installation, multisensory environments, and human-machine interaction. She is currently completing her MFA in Digital Futures at OCAD University and brings over eight years of professional experience in graphic design and visual communication. Her practice explores how presence, memory, and affect shape our relationships with responsive systems, with a focus on co-creative and embodied interaction. Golnoush has worked across experience design, accessibility-focused web design, and event production, and has exhibited work at APF . OCAD Nexus. She is interested in collaborative projects that bridge design, technology, and lived experience.