In clinical studies of panic and anxiety, CCK-4 is an anxiogenic administered to induce momentary severe anxiety and panic in patients and test subjects. A common characteristic of extreme anxiety is the catastrophic misinterpretation of a given event. The momentary experience of time is pushed to extremes of speed and slowness, and spatial dimension and magnitude become difficult to comprehend. In this instance subjects become acutely aware of not only their own body and mind but also the environment in which they are embedded.
CCK-4 presents a set of contexts in which the visitor’s attention is directed towards the psychological and physiological processes that form the subjective perception of a given space and time. Works in the exhibition explore the inherent elasticity of human perception by heightening the viewer’s awareness of external spatial and temporal aspects of the exhibition, and attunes us to the internal perceptive processes that organize our sense of time and space. In the exhibition’s entirety, CCK-4 curatorially considers how emotion, mental states, and sensorial stimulus form the complex ensemble of one’s extended experience of the present moment.
