Performative Sensory Environment
in collaboration with Chris Salter, TeZ, David Howes, Jorg Hempenius, Harry Smoak, David Szanto and Caro Verbeek

Year
2012

Supported By

TodaysArt; Fonds de recherche du Québec-Société et culture (FQRSC), Canada; Hexagram Concordia, Canada          

The performative sensory environment Displace 2.0 takes place in the building of the recently dissolved platform TAG in the Hague for the 2012 TodaysArt festival. Displace 2.0 puts your sensory experience in the foreground. Groups of visitors progress through the three floors of the TAG building, encountering a series of environments and experience sensory-based actions that intermingle the senses of smell, taste, sight, sound and touch. At first, these sensory modalities are separated from each other, but then they grow over time to cause intense, almost hallucinatory sensations merging to the point of saturation.

Displace 2.0 is the second iteration of works conducted within the context of a larger research project entitled “Mediations of Sensation” developed by Chris Salter and anthropologist David Howes.  The aim of  “Mediations” is to create a space where contemporary art practice can be informed by advanced research in sensory anthropology and history and vice versa. Sensory anthropology is dedicated to exploring how the senses are distinguished, ranked, mixed, deployed and enjoyed in different cultures. Displace 2.0 mirrors this anthropological experience by offering a sensorially compelling, technologically augmented series of environments designed to open a crack in the conventional Western sensorium and transport the visitor into a parallel sensory world.