BLINDFOLDED 360 °

BLINDFOLDED is an audiovisual expedition: The goal of this journey is not a specific place, but rather the emergence of a certain feeling, the development and awareness of a virtual I - the experience of avatarising oneself. The focus is on the representation of possible worlds and possible embodiments of the self. The process of perception is seen as a constructive act and treated as such. In the piece “BLINDFOLDED”, the audience is subjected to a process of collecting knowledge. The autopoietic principle is transferred to the piece. A system that circularly produces the components of which it consists, that produces and sustains itself through the manufacture of its constituent parts. A being does not just exist, but it is constantly evolving out of itself.

The question of brain and mind, consciousness and the unconscious has preoccupied people since ancient times.

The results of brain research over the past few decades call into question the widespread self-image of humans as being controlled by conscious mechanisms. Gerhard Roth shaped neurobiological constructivism in the 80s, in which the brain and not the conscious ego, as it is subjectively perceived, is represented as the constructor of our reality. Our worldview is therefore not a representation of reality, but a construction. The unconscious processes in the brain form the basis for our thinking and acting. One of the basic ideas of constructivism is that there is no such thing as an independent truth. The question of reality arises. What is reality Every view of the world is rather individually and subjectively constructed. The brain creates a virtual actor (the self) that acts in everyday reality. What we understand as reality is a part of something big. The piece "BLINDFOLDED" takes up this idea and approaches this idea with the help of VR technology.

What happens to the “body” construct in this system? We are fleshy beings who need physical presence. What happens when the physical space is dominated by the virtual? Just like the virtual environment, the avatar is not subject to any real physical conditions and can therefore, just like the environment, deform to infinity, multiply, dissolve or split off body parts. The change in neural activity is exclusively quantitative.

Every perception causes a discharge of the nerve cells, which varies in strength depending on the intensity of the stimulus. The brain does not receive any qualitative information about the type of arousal. The sense organs transmit a quantitative change. The qualitative properties are then constructed in the brain. The sense organs are connected to specific areas of the brain. Experiments on patients with an open skull showed that, for example, stimulation in the visual center causes an optical hallucination. The piece "BLINDFOLDED" tries specifically to "fire up" the brain with information: auditory and visual.