La perception transamplithéâtrale
Alexis Crawshaw, Maud Watel-Kazak, Marcos Novak

https://ccs.ucsb.edu/primavera/#perception

This transdisciplinary installation/performance explores the ideas of fractured perception, multiphrenia (after psychologist Kenneth J.Gergen, that one personality becomes fragmented into many as a symptom of the demands of modern society and the sometimes conflicting roles that we must play within it), apophenia (the tendency of the mind to construct meaning or agency in otherwise meaningless data), and how our experience of the world is shaped by context and environment. A collaboration between Alexis Crawshaw, guest artist Maud Watel-Kazak, and Marcos Novak, this work is an investigation, through diverse modalities, into the contiguous relationship between performance/artistic gesture (by the artists), perceptual gesture (by the audience member), and contextual gesture (by the manipulation of space in the venue of performance).

Present in the work is the use of 3D-generated masks expressing multiphrenia and inviting multiple interpretations on the part of its perceiver. It will feature original poetry in “Franglish” that develops author Raymond Roussel’s method of procédé and psychologist Diana Deutsch’s study of “phantom words”. Virtual art projections will develop how one can approach and thus perceive the same physical space in multiple ways, depending on the point of focus and the context, also as a function of accumulated memory. There will equally be a study of the psychosomatic influences of the installation on audience members through vibrotactile infrasounds, using feedback from a heart-rate sensor.