Sónar 2007: 'Feed' by Kurt Hentschlager

Sónar 2007: Feed by Kurt Hentschläger

Feed, Performance for Unreal Characters, Fog, Stroboscopes & Pulse Lights by Kurt Hentschlager at Sónar 2007

***

You are sitting inside a huge dark cube. There is no light except the projection of floating bodies. They are asexual and neither have eyes nor mouths in their faces. You hear grime and rhythmic sub-bass sounds and the dime lights on the screen flicker according to these audio incentives.

Their bodies are constantly forced to move, as if they received electric shocks, every three or four seconds. You have read before that the whole performance will last about 50 minutes, so you analyse every repetitive movement – a flow of conceptual associations starts to circulate around ideas of “primordial soup”, reproduction, control, representation, cloning, video-graphic games and media history.

Suddenly everything changes – the bodies disappear and the whole cube is covered with thick, artificial fog. Now you are the bodies. You are not able to see anything, not even your own hands in front of your face. You notice that some people leave the cube. You remember you had to sign a paper that you do not suffer claustrophobia, epilepsy and similar physical disorders. Before you get used to this completely immersive environment, cruel light-shots start to invade your visual senses. They fill the whole smoke and hit you with a stroboscopic frequency of 25, 30 per second, probably, you just realize that it is to fast for your perception.

The white space you perceive has no spatial representation, it is rather inside your head than in front of your eyes. You remember the childhood’s nightmares you could never explain, because they were just a weird and uncomfortable feeling. Finally, you get to realise what this feeling is like. You analyze it: It consists of the lack of orientation, the absolute absence of space. The cube around you becomes nothing, a „none“-space. You have lost your visual senses, the external forces reach directly your head.

From one moment to the other everything gets to an end. All you see is just black. Silence. You still smell the fog, but you know that it’s over.

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