* Exhibited @ Venice Experimental Cinema & Performance Art Festival, "Future Identities - Bodies . Places . Spaces", 71st Venice International Film Festival, Palazzo Albrizzi & Palazzo Ca'Zanardi, Venice, Italy, 2014
* Nominated & Exhibited for the Lumen Prize, London, NY, Hong Kong, 2013
Featured in: The Creators Project Blog, Visual News, The Curious Brain, Mutant Space
Written, Directed & Edited: Yovo
SYNOPSIS:
We have entered the age of narrative chaos, where established frameworks are being overthrown by emergent radical experiments that aim to re-master the art of storytelling with developing technologies. Since time ‘sped up’, we are losing the concept of physical space. New electronic components are blurring the boundaries between the active and passive experience of art and the built environment. The axiomatic foundation of our existence is being called into question. Inhabiting our body, it turns out, is just as tenuous an internal construct as our spatial illusion and distorted corporeal self.
This video collage combines modified found footage with pre-recorded one in an interplay that attempts to mimic a hypothetical sleep onset of a person, i.e. the transition from wakefulness into sleep. The idea being that with the advancement of transhumanist ideology & neurotechnology, we might arrive at a time where we could choose our own visual narrative. We might playback our subconsciously stored images seen throughout the day as a movie. All of the frames have been specifically made into animated GIFs and then recombined back into a video in order to induce a repetitive, monotone effect. It is also a cautionary tale of the advent of neuroprosthetics and what might it be if in the future we are to be able to experience such 'designed' scenarios as a form of neuro-entartainment. The video attempts to stay true to the hypnagogic imagery (experience) by using the gaze or the eye of the beholder (or protagonist) as a starting point of a journey through the visual artifacts of the day gone and loosely constructed narrative structure that effortlessly emerge from the shift in conscious perception. The sound used is an amplified 6 Hz binaural beat also known as the theta wave rhythm (an oscillatory pattern in EEG signals recorded either from inside the brain or from electrodes glued to the scalp). This video is part of a bigger personal study that I am currently pursuing, that deal with this threshold mental phenomena and includes lucid dreaming, hallucinations, sleep paralysis and the uncanny valley.
The video montage was designed to be viewed as an installation piece, one visitor at a time, while floating in an isolation tank with stereo headphones.
WARNING: ABOVE VIDEO CONTAINS FLASHING IMAGES
(Please use stereo headphones as it features a 6 Hz Theta + isochronic pulses)