EMPAC presented FEED, a 50-minute show by artist Kurt Hentschläger, November 16 through November 18 in the RPI Playhouse. Hentschläger used a variety of techniques to immerse the audience. The show started with an animated naked man swimming across the screen, moving in the manner of a sperm. An ethereal soundscape, which shook the audience with strong bass, accompanied the vivid animation. In the second half, the room was flooded with fog, rendering traditional senses useless, replacing them with flashing lights and omnipresent sound.
The naked man swimming around in black space created a discomfort—not only due to the voyeuristic nature of seeing a man swimming like an animal in a zoo, but also the unnatural movement patterns of swimming and then jerking. Sperm, as a metaphor for sexual reproduction, collapsed when the body divided into first two and then finally more and more naked bodies. The spectacle continued to intrigue as the bodies interacted, but rather impersonally, maybe as a colony of bees would. The lack of a plot, replaced with a need to create anthropomorphism, in order to give these bodies their own story that would transcend this almost primeval condition, made this portion of the work difficult to parse, but rewarding to explore. The ambient sound cancelled out any remains of the human world, successfully plunging the viewer into a remarkable trance.
Now that the audience had been successfully transported to a new world, fog filled the room rapidly. Normally this would have been a jolting experience, but the acclimation to the swimming body world made the transition to fog appear as just another stop in the sensory journey. Strobe lights filled the fog with color, creating patterns in the retina when one closed their eyes. The psychedelic nature of the experience successfully added a more dramatic layer to the sensory cues.
Hentschläger, self-described as a composer of video and audio, finds it interesting to bring together the mediums in a synesthetic fashion. However, he found it a challenge to create an immersive environment with video, unlike with audio, because video requires a plane for viewing. In FEED, he eliminated this requirement by completely removing the space with use of fog. He has created many shows using real time audio and video effects, but this is the first show he has done with fog.
“Space collapses practically on your retina. You erase any idea of space and this becomes a pure architecture of light,” Hentschläger said.
He relates the experience to that of climbing mountains in his native Austria—where the clouds become very thin, dispersed, and ethereal. The higher one climbs up the mountain, the more beautiful the light becomes, however, the experience becomes more dangerous because of the lack of oxygen. Hentschläger wanted to create the same kind of controlled environment that would overwhelm the senses. He described it as “a process of melting—certain protective measures are taken away.”
Hentschläger said the experience “can be elevating, can be disturbing.” The only complaint one will have is that of not being the only person in the room, something which truly would bring the viewer to an isolated world. The next best option, if loud bass sounds are not a bother, is to sit in the front row where only fog, and no seats, will remain in the field of view.
