Contemporary art experiences cater to the two major senses of human body i.e. as the eyes and the ears primarily because they are reproducible and distributable using today’s technology. We still haven’t found a way to transfer other sensations that an individual can feel, be it smell, taste or touch. Although they occupy a small spectrum of our daily experiences, they are deeply moving and memorable. For me, touch and especially the sensation of temperature had a deep sensorial meaning of lightness that I wanted to convey to the audience through Project Haze.
One can never capture an experience completely (that is if we can know what ‘completely’ means); one can only decipher it into distinct sensorial chunks and hope they fit together coherently. When that happens, an amalgamation of the present and the past memories, the fresh and the known takes place, and boundaries dissolve. This blurriness, this distortion of images is what French philosopher Gaston Bachelard calls as an essential element of the ‘Poetics of Air’. This sense of elation, of movement, of soft succession in thought or language is something that has intrigued me for a long time. It was this reason I chose lightness as the topic of my enquiry.
There are several painting and movies that have served as a source of inspirations in my endeavours. There was an affinity towards Romanticism, which called upon the appreciation of nature and the past and a rhetoric to man’s obsession with the use of machinery and artificial. The emergent themes were sublime, distortion, flow, blur, Ganzfeld effect, etc.
While pondering about these artworks, I was reminded of a serene trek that I once took to Mullayanagiri, the highest peak of Karnataka, and wrote about the experience that I witnessed there. These words titled Cloud Gate served as an entry point to my project. And it led me to the following observations:
Due to amorphous and fluid nature of the material, mist behaves exactly opposite to a glass - while it allows a user to pass through it, his visibility is compromised. This conceptually opens whole new suite of interactions.
The temperature and other haptic sensations around the mist adds to the immersive-ness of the experience. The air is moist with water particles just large enough to wet but not drench the skin. Imagine that in Gandhinagar summers that record a max of whopping 42 degrees celsius. This fact added a functional aspect to this project.
Finding oneself enveloped around a dynamic media like mist or endless water shakes the notion of a stable ground that an individual derives from a stable horizon. This temporarily nullifies one thoughts and activates the parasympathetic nervous system of one’s body.
The perception of space and subsequently time is lost as the individual experiences a uniform simulation field of white noise and light around him/her. Such state is deeply therapeutic and hence desirable.
When we think about the cherished natural phenomena of the past decades that are slowing dying on the onslaught of urbanisation and subsequent environmental pollution, the early morning fog and monsoon comes to most of our minds. I personally find this sensory experience of moving through water very invigorating. Also, the sound (or the absence of it) and the smell of nature during these events have invoked a deep sense of nostalgia and a calming effect in my mind. This is possibly true for everyone, be it someone who has never experienced mist (but only smog) before.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
An ephemeral work that changes in appearance according to the qualities of the sunlight and the wind, the installation produces a continual outpouring of swirling mist that dissolves the boundaries and outlines of the objects it encounters. This lively 'cloud', emitted from the plumbing system positioned in the trapezoidal pit of the NID terrace, invites visitors’ active engagement and participation.
This project is a romantic gesture to those experiences and a call to what we might be missing. At the same time, it derives rhetoric from the fact that in the wake of modernisation and climate change, especially one involving water depletion and pollution, artificial means have to be deployed to recreate and experience a natural phenomenon like ones mentioned above. This detachment with the usual self (while experiencing) and with the environment (post experience) is something I wanted the visitor to realise and ponder upon.
PROJECT CONCEPT
The underlying concept behind the work is as follows - When exposed to a relatively uniform stimulation field, the 'dream drive’ of the human mind kicks-in and conjures up new ideas and thoughts. The installation tries to stimulate this effect in the mind of its audience by dynamically changing their perception of space and possibly time.
INTENDED AUDIENCE EXPERIENCE
The project provides an inclusive and immersive experience to its visitors by engaging four senses: touch, auditory, visual and olfactory senses.
TOUCH: The installation invites guests to enter the mist, upon which they first encounter the cooling sensation of the water droplets on them. These droplets are minute enough to cover a person but not drench them entirely. Also, the air contributes to the movement of the particles and cooling sensation.
AUDITORY & VISUAL: The static and uniform exposure to the white noise of the running water and the play of light with the fog creates a private space around the visitor that cuts away the distraction outside. Against the sunlight, people can experience complete circular rainbows.
OLFACTORY: In the presence of natural soil bed, the water lives behind a trail of earthy scent which, for many visitors, becomes a reason to enter the space in the first place.
The installation in its raw form tries to transport the visitor 'among the clouds' where one can enjoy pure natural bliss in an uninterrupted fashion while still having the liberty to move around and interact with other visitors. With added projections of generative visuals in the dark, the space transforms into immersive landscape where the audience has the liberty to ‘walk through or with the light’.