Hidden Rooms

Marie-France Bojanowski (CAN/CHE)

The Hidden Room explores the concept of “cerebral scenography” in the context of an immersive panoramic visual experience involving neurofeedback interaction, including amplified perception of spatiality and sudden “change of location” enabled by the individual him or herself. Wearing an immersive system with EEG sensors and an electronic compass to look at and navigate within panorama images - the “Virtual Panorama” - the user strolls through a virtual labyrinth containing doors that he/ she finds and activates with the mind in order to cross to the other side. The Hidden Room speaks of possible worlds. It evokes the Unconscious and the reversed order of things, also inspiring a “narrative“ grid where one has to find a door leading to a room hidden in one’s own spatiality. This door is a metaphor for the openings in our own mind leading us to our own inner spaces. Investigating the feedback loop between the mind and various immersive environments, the experience aims at evoking the dream feeling of having a conversation with the self through the encounter of situations and emotions.

This work was created as part of the Swiss artists-in-labs program 2011 in the Swiss Research Institute entitled Native Systems Group at the Computer Systems Institute, ETH Zurich. This program is financed by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture (FOC) Switzerland.

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Where are We going?

Curious Minds (INT)

This is an artwork in the form of a simple pocket game that can be played anywhere and nowhere. Playing the game echoes the experience members of the group had of what it is like to be lost on a volcano with and how it feels when you finally find your way down and are sitting in front of a cup of fresh brewed coffee. The goal of the game is to “climb” up and back down the grid. Players take turns rolling the dice and moving up and down the "volcanic grid".The player who reaches the top of the “volcano” and climbs back down first wins the game. The work has been exhibited in Canada and Japan where many enjoyed playing it and who became part of the exhibit as “actionists”.

The Fire

Kilu (USA)

The Fire, Lightsculpture is a light installation that reveals the alchemic product of a laser and a fog apparatus. Placed within a lucite chassis, the fog is dispensed in a regular manner, but is dissected by a flat laser beam that illuminates the fog’s turbulences. The sculpture produced is flat, transient, and vigorous, resembling the flames of a fire. Although in reality the fog is ephemeral, only waiting to morph and ultimately dissipate, The Fire, appears tangible as if one could bottle its properties forever.

This is Something for Me

Curious Minds (INT)

This is a book that needs to be read like a piece of music is played. The reader is therefore a „performer“ and the method in which the book read is the performer’s „interpretation“ of it. Instructions tell the performer always regard the “now”, to always remain calm and silent, let each turn page be felt as an affecting movement of thebody and to see the changes in colour as changes in light. For those who perform it, it becomes self.evident that we are the landscapes we live in and that there is an emotional tie between us that is at every moment there, when we are asleep or when we are awake, when the weather changes or when it does not, when earthquakes shake us, or when volcanoes find eruption.

Selected Photographic Works

Monika Rut (INT)

It was the early photographers such as Walker Evans who were inspired by Emerson and applied his concept of transparency to the art of making photography. In the photographic works of Monika Rut an emotional connection between the foreground objects and their background provide the essential subject of each work. It is this intra-subjectivity that stimulates what is intrinsically shared between both and made apparent to the viewer as they begin to interpret each work. A a type of dialectic takes place in the observation process of the viewer, which not only takes place between foreground and background content, but also between humanity and nature. This is because the photographic works in question here are portrait photos taken in the setting of a natural landscape, where thesis and antithesis, or human kind and nature synthesis together into a higher truth or transcendent connectivity. In this manner, apparent dichotomies dissolve and transform into a synergistic experience or harmonic state like the one Emerson hoped to define and describe.