Exploring how art and stimulation can be combined to create immersive experiences, creating a nervous response and evoking feelings in a constructed space.
I have become very interested in how we can use technology and art to engage with the senses to produce a nervous response, and exploring how to evoke target reactions from the mind and body using light, sound, touch, smell and taste as well as interacting with the vestibular, interoceptive and proprioceptive systems of the body.
To further my research into this, I have explored some sensory installations that have taken place where the artists have used the elements above to stimulate a desired experience to share with people.
Dialogue in the Dark was an exhibition in London, organised by Dialogue Social Enterprise. The overall mission of DSE is the promotion of empathy towards populations who are excluded or at the risk thereof.
"In Dialogue in the Dark exhibition visitors are led by blind guides in small groups through a specially constructed and totally darkened exhibition – where sounds, wind, temperatures and textures convey the characteristics of daily environments such as a park, a city or a bar. In the dark, daily routines become a new experience. A reversal of roles are created: sighted people are torn out of their familiar environments, losing the sense they rely on most - their sight. Blind people guide them, provide them with security and a sense of orientation - transmitting a world without pictures."
An exhibition by Ryoji Ikeda at 180 The Strand, London. The Japanese artist’s solo show is an intense fusion of sound and vision.
"Ikeda’s innovative work explores the essential characteristics of sound and light by means of mathematical precision and aesthetics. The artist engages with frequencies and scales difficult for the human ear and mind to comprehend, visualising sounds, and rendering the imperceptible through numerical systems and computer aesthetics."