What do you see in the space you are in?
Hjerterom_
Welcome to Sansesentralen.
Our mission is to make your daily life more sensuousness.
It is peppermint smell in the room. Red and pink lights brightening up the room. A bed for you to sit down on. What do you see? Will you still smell the peppermint in the other reality?
“Hjerterom_” is a virtual reality experience and performance. Sansesentralen invites one audience at the time to explore intimacy by looking. The spectator or “patient” are lead into a meeting with a “psychoanalyst”. The “patient” takes a Rorschach test and gets an offer for a love booster with a VR experience.
When eyes meets, it creates a connection between people. Can we find the same intensity through a digital version? And what does it look like?
Part of the project #kunstellasjoner by Oslo Teatersenter.
Created by: Sansesentralen
VR design: Rasmus Ottesen Stride
Set design: Rasmus Ottesen Stride
Performer: Rasmus Ottesen Stride
Dramaturgy: Sarah Kaurin Jonassen
After the performance «Møtet» Sansesentralen established as a company. Sansesentralen is a collaboration with experience designer and visual artist Rasmus Ottesen Stride. We continued to perform as the fake firm Sansesentralen. We kept working with intimacy. This time we wanted to explore how to incorporate VR experience in a performance. We were curious how we could create intimacy with a digital format.
Need a love booster?
A treatment from Sansesentralen.
Scan me with your phone.
The audience got a card with QR code of the love booster to also use after the performance, so the performance could continue after the performance.
How can we create intimacy with a digital platform?
The virtual experience is sensorial. It creates an illusion of being somewhere else. The experience is being build up with the conversation with the analyst in advanced. The analyst asks what the “patient” see in the Rostock pictures. He acts as adding this information into the VR glasses that is prescribed as a “love booster”. In the performance “The encounter” by Simon McBurney, technology creates an illusion. As if he is speaking right by your side, walking around you and other sound effects. The effect together with the performance makes the performance sensorial. Cristina Maldonado played with senses and virtual reality in her performance "INSIDER". In the VR, audience saw they touched an object, while in real life they touched something else. Technology is often seen upon as the opposite of intimacy and sensuousness. Since it is lack of human connection. Mixing human connection and technology, can create a sensuous experience.
Can you smell peppermint in the room?
Sansesentralen used smell to create a immersive experience in “Møtet” and “Hjerterom_” . This is part of our combination of experience design and performance. During our process of combing the two forms, we came over Human Specific Performance. Human Specific Performance is a theatre genre several companies in Scandinavia is working with. Sisters Hope and Cantabile 2 is two examples.
Cantabile 2 is a danish company that arrange meetings between humans as individuals. They do not define audience as spectators. Their meetings is not about universal topics. It is about the individuals being in the meeting. They do not use fiction, characters or improvisations. They create space for human connection and emotions. On their webpage Human Specific Performance defines as:
Personalized Theatre for audience.
Is designed to for small audience to relate to each individual visitor.
Is dependent on audience participation.
Facilitate genuine encounters in immersive environment.
Explores and employs different forms of sensuous, verbal and physical communication
“Møtet” and “Hjerterom_” touches many of the definitions of Human Specific Performance. Until now we have not tried the high risk of being dependent on audience participation. Audience could decide take part. This is a discourse for Sansesentralen next project.