Peter Salvatore Petralia states “A physical space exists in the world, and the experience of that space exists in the listener’s consciousness” (2010, p.101). This is the concept we wanted to make apparent within our work. The notion of thinking of the space around us as having being ‘twinned’ with an aspect of our psyche. We aim to achieve this through the control we have over the audience’s thought process with the microphones and headphones. There is evidence to suggest that headphones can allow a performance to be directed to one person even when they are surrounded by a room full of people. As a group we wanted to take this idea one step further and experiment with one audience member through hearing, smell, touch and taste, with the absence of sight. Our vision colours our perception of the world, it enhances our imagination and confirms the identity of the objects and people around us. What are we without this confirmation of appearance? Are we simply an entity that resides in an environment as restricted as a box? The work of Neil Harbisson and his use of technology within his journey of listening to colour links with these ideas:

It explores the possibility that technology can be regarded as a seventh sense as it is opening up our experience of the world as a human being and providing us with data and information we would not normally obtain in daily life. In the box the audience member will take part in something they would not engage with on a regular basis, we are programmed to rely heavily on our sight and when this is taken away what are the consequences? This is what we are investigating through our experimental piece, whether or not in the box you will find yourself in a state of disembodiment. As we mentioned before Jonathan Harris’ project ‘We feel fine‘ provides us with a glimpse of somebody’s life and essentially a “photographic heartbeat” (Harris,2007). Our next stage of rehearsal is to create more text following our working progress showing, in order to form a more abstract experience for the audience member and reinforce their journey within the box and the many places in which it resides.

From performing over Twitter I feel that this is potentially a source of text for us. As a group we discussed this and agreed that typing the five automated writing words into twitter or google would be a good place to start, in trying to challenge this barrier of technology as a seventh sense. Can it replace our sight, does our world become more robotic with the input of numbers and programmes rather than colour and emotion?

448 words

Works Cited 

Harris, Jonathan (2007) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5lZ9wciZQM (accessed 10th November 2012)

Petralia, Peter Salvatore (2010) Headspace”Architectural Space in the Brain , Contemporary Theatre Review, 20:1,96-108