Research

LATENT DIMENSIONS



LATENT DIMENSIONS is a three year production project investigating immersive visuals and presence. Starting in January 2011, this work has been supported by Brighton and Hove City Council, Arts Council England and Performing Arts Lab.


Artist’s statement:


Ten years ago, I fell down a ravine in Ecuador and broke three vertebrae: as I fell I had a powerful feeling that the experience “was just a dream” and on landing my body seemed far below me. Since then, my work has examined how we model and locate our lived experience. My intention always being to expose notions of presence, identity, agency and embodiment as intrinsically plastic.


Over the next three years, I will bring together phenomenology and brain sciences with my creative animation practice to build hybrid performances and installations that investigate issues around presence, immersive environments and the body. With particular reference to the design of the eighteenth century Phantasmagoria, a form of immersive theatre that combined the magic lantern with stagecraft to conjure the feeling of impossible presences, the Latent Dimensions projects use the visual technologies of the 21st century to interrogate the deeply subjective and personal “feeling” of reality.

Between June to October 2011 I was Visiting Artist at Embassy Court and created the first large-scale installation of the NO PLACE project. NO PLACE at Embassy Court was commissioned by Brighton’s White Night Festival 2011. Documentation of the White Night performance will be collected here over the next months: http://noplace1.wordpress.com/


Further project development through 2012 explores augmented reality, large-scale projection environments, biofeedback technology and a variety of motion tracking devices, from the Kinect to wearable vests. Our investigations are aligned with the interdisciplinary field of Presence Research, which brings together philosophers, computer scientists, neuroscientists and artists to investigate how the sensation of “being there” is created when people interact with computer-mediated and real environments.

This extended Chroma Collective project aims to use immersive animation, binaural audio and movement work within structured, narrative experiences to explore the following:

•Emotional and visceral bodily reactions to immersive visuals (fear, vertigo, excitement, relaxation)
•Realtime exploration of virtual environments using Kinect sensors with the Unity 3D games engine
•Bio feedback from bodily reactions into the performance itself to explore new possibilities for embodiment (real-time heartbeat heard through headphones, EEG signals fed back to effect the visual elements of the virtual world)
•Social experiences of immersivity and ethical and behavioral implications of this contemporary phenomenon
•Out of body experiences and metamorphosis (exploring feelings of being outside your physical body, ʻbody swappingʼ, and impossible experiences such as flight)
•The active role that imagination plays in visual and auditory perception (to be explored by combining specific audio whilst shifting between stylistically different environments: both figurative and abstract.)
•The plasticity of subjective perception (how immersed participants navigate rapid changes in scale, season, time – with particular reference to optical illusions)