Session 2 Exercises in Immersion
Friday, 13:00 – 14:00, De Balie
Surround cinema with spatial sound immerses the audience in a spectacle of sound and images. How is this done? What happens to the senses?
Naut Humon
Transitions of the Spacial Station
Director of Recombinant Media Labs (RML) Naut Humon (USA) speaks on the formation, deployment and current activities of California’s Recombinant Labs and their West Coast affiliates. RML is an experimental mobile facility for the experiential engineering of surround cinema and immersive arts. Recombinant is a term derived from the field of genetics. Springing from this elastic media grid is a process which illustrates how an electronically strained ‘offspring’ comes to possess cultural characteristics not always present in either ‘parent’.
As their operation has networked nomadically to different locales internationally, the focus on spatial media synthesis in fixed and locative dispositions has remained paramount. Stories of Sound Traffic Control towers in strange airports piloted by wild women with sonic space knives like Maryanne Amacher or earlier on projects with Diamanda Galas and her quadraphonic mic clusters are all inspirational to RML’s directives.
The multi-channel thinking that transformed the analogue expeditions into the technological correlated RML CineChamber of the 2000s is also emphasized, where the embodiment of the digital image and subsequent panorama was grafted onto the exo-skeleton of RML’s auralized identity in the last 20 years. Now the stage is being framed for the next tens spatial springboard with fresh residencies and alliances with universities, foundations and festivals as RML delves further into the science of aural-optical phenomena.
Naut Humon (US) is the founder of Recombinant Media Labs and was head of A&R for Asphodel Records. During the 1970s he resented a series of ‘destabilized’ media events designed to repurpose the visitor’s frame of reference. Later activities emphasized a strong musical foundation with tactile instrumentation and audio/video technologies that focus the perceptions of the viewer on the physicalization of form.
Christopher Salter
The Question of Thresholds: Immersion, Absorption and Dissolution in Cross-modal Environments
In 1968, an unrealized proposal developed in 1968 by visual artists James Turrell and Robert Irwin for curator Maurice Tuchman’s ambitious series of artist/corporate pairings under the auspices of the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which ran from 1967-1971, aimed to explore the transformation of consciousness under the extreme reduction of sensory input. Turrell and Irwin attempted to build a combination between two spaces: an anechoic chamber, a room that absorbs all reflection such that no sound ever leaves its point of origin and a ganzfeld, a visual field without depth or size or what Brian Massumi labeled ‘chaos in the total field of vision.’ In the ganzfeld, Massumi writes that ‘although subjects had difficulty putting what they had failed to experience in properly visual terms, they were relentlessly prodded to do so by experimenters.’ Most described an unfocusable ‘cloud’ or ‘fog’ of no determinate shape or measurable distance from the eyes. Some just saw ‘something,’ others just ‘nothing.’ One acute observer saw ‘levels of nothingness.’
My current artistic and theoretical research explores such threshold auditory-visual-perceptual spaces and how such spaces dynamically alter concepts of body and self. I am interested in where our perceiving consciousness loosely defined as a sensory ‘self’ is situated in these processes of immersion, embodiment, dissolution and reconstitution that arise from our encounters with cross modal perception.
This talk will thus examine the repercussions of Turrell’s and Irwin’s proposal to investigate the thresholds of perception in an experiential environment. Specifically, I will focus on the conception of the self and body in both contemporary artistic practices with media coupled with recent concepts arising from enactive cognition. What role does spatiality play in these synchretic perceptions? What happens to the ‘sensing self’ and its embodiment in audio-visual environments that overload or reduce our perception and how does this self expand or dissolve through such encounters?
