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Deviations in Mary’s Room




Deviations in Mary’s Room is a multidisciplinary installation that explores the limits of perception through Frank Jackson’s thought experiment Mary’s Room and the deviation introduced by Hilary Putnam’s critique of its premise. The project begins with an archive of 217 deviated, speculative or impossible questions, such as is it possible to see a colour without having learned it before?, which open up relationships between thought, perception and language. These questions form Mary’s Deviated Universe, a programmed and rendered digital environment that functions as a cartography in which each question acts as a node connected to others through different thematic axes.

This universe unfolds into a photographic investigation that brings together portraits, instruments related to perception and neurodivergence, testimonies from people with synesthesia collected from Reddit, and finally images of those same synesthetic experiences generated through AI. Here, the computational system is understood as a contemporary Mary, processing information and constructing representations of experiences it cannot directly experience. As a whole, the project feeds back into an epistemological loop, generating a circuit between question, experience and imagination in order to represent experiences that escape visible perception.

Mary, Fig. 1 & Wartenberg’s Cutaneous Nerve Exploration Wheel
UV inkjet prints on aluminium panels & engraved aluminium plate / 2025
Fig. 1. Observer actively constructing what is observed
Engraved aluminium plate / 2025





Archive of Deviated Questions
vinyl / 2025




Mary’s Deviated Universe
Cartography of 217 Questions / 2025





Mary’s Deviated Universe
Programmed and rendered interactive digital environment / 2025














Lithograph from Traité complet de l'anatomie de l'homme
Nicolas Henri Jacob / c. 1840


























Lettre sur les aveugles á l’usage de ceux qui voient
Diderot, D. / 1749









I see a flash of light when I hear an unexpected sound.

By unexpected, I mean when the environment is supposed to be quiet, usually at night when my eyes are closed (perhaps I’m a little startled by surprise). For example, if I hear a pen drop, I see a quick flash of light. The sound also has to be brief, not a prolonged buzzing, etc., and I must not see the source of the sound. It doesn’t happen often, but often enough that I’ve searched for it on Google (it seems like no one else has this experience).

u/Sonder-99. Reddit testimony, from the Is This Synesthesia? thread / 2025










I have color-emotion synesthesia, where the feelings I experience (mainly in my stomach) correspond to colors.

I see them in a vertically stretched sphere that probably represents my body. Whenever I feel something (not touching something, but simply a physical emotion or hunger), the corresponding color appears in that space.

For example, if you liked someone, you might have experienced what people call “butterflies in your stomach” (I’m German, so I’m not sure if that’s what it’s called in English). In my case, that’s purple-pink flickering through the center up to the upper-middle part of the sphere. A bit like an old TV with no signal, but only in pink.

My general mood is like a gradient from white to yellow, orange, dark red (regular red is shock), and black. But it never fills the whole thing with a single color. For example, if I’m happy, the upper part above the center is white, while the rest is mainly yellow with a little orange in the lower part.

u/hiveangel. Reddit testimony, from the Is This Synesthesia? thread / 2025










Two-point discrimination test on the fingertip. A neurological test used to assess the ability to distinguish between two simultaneous points of touch.




A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts
Young T. /  1807









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