Homeopathic Music with 1-dimensional Visuals

Installative performance with DMX-controlled LED washers, custom-made masks, electracoustic soundtrack, pillows

Audience during a session in Berlin

Homeopathic Music with 1-Dimensional Visuals delivers an extreme perceptual experience based on sensory deprivation, pink noise derived-sounds and Ganzfeld visuals. It fundamentally subverts the current overload of information plaguing current society, so that people can let their own mental imaging and hearing run free for most of the duration of the piece, with only subliminal hints directing the flow. It can be presented either as a 30-minute performance or as an installation running every 30 minutes, consisting of an electroacoustic soundtrack and a visual track for high powered LED washers controlled with Max/MSP. Audience members are expected to lie on their backs in pillows and wear custom-made masks that create zero-depth, plain color fields from the projected lights.

The visual element in the work echoes the immersive Ganzfeld effect of the light installations of James Turrell and the absolute cinema in Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, creating an emptied-out visual narrative in which figure and/or depth are abolished altogether. The audience is constrained to see nothing but uniform light and its flow across time, as if their vision consisted of a single pixel ranging from slow and gentle color movement to fast and intense flashing (the audience must be warned that people with epilepsy or sensibility to flashing lights should not participate).

In the electroacoustic soundtrack, a pink noise sound mass moves slowly, generating minimal change and only gradually revealing other sounds that are barely perceptible: at first, the noise masks every other sound, close to a threshold in which it is almost impossible for the audience to tell what is actually being heard and what is being imagined.

Raw documentation video available here, please be aware that the video cannot convey the experience happening behind the masks.