TELEPRESENCE at RGBXYZ Digital Arts Expo
Interactive Audio/Visual Installation
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2021
A collaboration with UNI_VERSE Studio
Credits:
Project Manager/Design/Programming: Nikzad Arabshahi
Sound Design: Maggie Khorami
Production: InterNodal Studio, UNI_VERSE Studio
Photography: Nikzad Arabshahi
About
You are about to enter a zone/an experiment that is created to manipulate your sensation. Formulated an interwoven sonic and visual experience to confuse your perceptual apparatus, and challenge your certainty of being here and now.
It involves you in an oscillation state, swinging between the feeling of telepresence within an artificial world while you perceive being inside the physical environment. Let your mind responding to the virtual stimuli similar as you would when exposed to the same unmediated stimuli. This response will be experienced at a different level, from your unconscious physiological behaviors, through your automatic reactions, and cognitive processing, including the sensation of being there as a place illusion, a type of presence that refers to the characteristic of being there even though you’re aware that you are not there. You’ll be amazed how your mind dissolving the real-world experiment with the digital/synthetic world, and overlook the technology to encounter the context.
Telepresence is a subjective perception that even though part or all of an individual’s current experience is generated by human-made technology, part or all of the individual’s perception fails to accurately acknowledge the role of the technology in the experience.
Consider beginning this experiment as entering an artificial chamber/a hall of imagination, you’ll be immersed by the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, a world that has different rules from our nature but, as a property of the technological system that used to present the artificial world parallel to the physical world.
Blend the synthetic world generated by codes with all the surrounding objects, let your eyes bring them all to the same layer. Exercise your vision, our eyes are more than receptors for light rays, and what is visible is earned by exercise. We do not see only because the light shines on objects around us exciting our retinas, but because of a code or a network of meanings that are in place prior to our seeing, allowing us to recognize these illuminated objects as meaningful forms. This thin layer redefines your vision from the physical world to a distinguished environment.
Feel the sound waves resonance with your spatial awareness, the reflected sound wave within its environment gives us knowledge about things that happen around us even outside our visual range. Our experience of a place is related to our experience of the place’s aural architecture, as we imagine a landscape, we can imagine the aural architecture of a soundscape, allowing us to recognize our spatial awareness. Spatial awareness includes more than the complexity of a reflected series of surrounding sonic events. It also includes the individual’s emotional and behavioral experiences with various spaces, spatial attributes, auditory perception, personal history, and cultural values that, at some point, affect our auditory modality, and move the concept of a series of sound events from the cognitive area to one of emotional meaning. Spatial awareness is emotionally engaged in hearing and gives a different meaning to our sonic experience.
This is a psychologically immersive experience, consider beginning this experiment as entering an artificial chamber, you’ll be immersed by the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality. Take a deep breath and enter the zone when you’re ready.
Nikzad Arabshahi – 2021
