The film is projected through both the artwork and its architectural setting, which together act as a projection device, turning people passing through the city into viewers and the archetypal American suburban house into an unlikely space-time capsule. In this transformation, the Mobile Homestead becomes a Magic lantern, a device from the dawn of cinema used to reproduce moving images and phantasmagoria, in the same type of domestic space where television once played a central role in mid-century American life. The footage reveals the inaccessible core of the original exhibition, while simultaneously reversing its spatial logic: the interior of the Paris show becomes the exterior of the MOCAD exhibition through projection. In the words of Loris Gréaud:

“Detroit has always fascinated me… I see it as a kind of kaleidoscope of potential lives. From its immense successes to its profound crises, it is at its heart that a magic lantern comes to life and illuminates the ‘Motor City’, the true cradle of our contemporary cultures. The lantern, like a soft machine, conveys stories. Whether beautiful, dark, enchanting, or frightening, its phantasmagoria is intimately linked to all forms of wonder. The city of Detroit is in itself a history of art. And art is a chance.”

In Cortical*Smoke+Mirrors, Gréaud treats the exhibition as a living body—an expanded perceptual system in which images, architectures, and technologies operate like interconnected neural pathways. The Mobile Homestead, the nocturnal film, and the displaced Paris exhibition function together as a sensitive apparatus that captures latent correspondences between visibility and absence, history and fiction, interiority and projection. This layered configuration mirrors the operations of human cognition, where perception is never singular but assembled through overlapping signals, memories, and associations. It is from this density—at once analytical and intuitive—that the exhibition draws its title, evoking the cortex as a site where knowledge, sensation, and consciousness converge, and where meaning emerges not through clarity alone, but through resonance.