The four elements in motion.
DESCRIPTION AND JUSTIFICATION FOR THE PROJECT.
"The senses are the first faculties to be developed. As such, they are should be the first to be nurtured." Rousseau.
Sensorama is a space and a group of people dadicated to developing the powers of perception. Through a sensual trip where the eyes are blindfolded and through atmospheric spaces full of textures, flavors, smells and sounds.
We know the importance of the five sences for the human being. They are essential to our understanding and relationship with nature and reality. In this time of "virtual reality" the development of our senses has become paralyzed; for this reason we have created the sensitizing process of Sensorama.
Contemporary education and culture are wreaking have on our visual sense, damaging our other senses, our sense of smell, of taste, of hearing and of touch: by hiding our eyes we cause our other senses to open wide, establishing contact with the true elements. The effects run directly to the central nervous system, enabling the connection between sense and reson, experience and information, fusing abstract and phsyical realities.
This project involves ecology as the particpant experiences the true nature of Nature, and not only at the invormative level.
Aimed at the public as whole, with more than five years of experience, Sensorama has been visited by more than 3,000 people, including those who suffer a disability, such as the blind, the deaf, those with mental disabilities, cebral paralysis and drug addiction, having wounderfull experiences with them.
How it Works:
The proposed project involves the four elements: Earth, Water, Wind and Fire.
Before beginning the sensual voyage the participants are given a brief introduction of the project, assuring them the safety and cleanliness of the site. Next, they are asked to cover their eyes , to remove their eyes, to remove their shoes and nenter the first phase.
· EARTH: It is here that the voyage begins, crawling into a plaster cave with a stone texture ( 1m in diameter, 2 m in length and an initial height of 50cm. expanding to 1.6m) Here the participants discover plaster stalagmites and in the crevices, teztural forms of corn and other seeds. Leaving the cave they are enveloped by plants, fragrant herbs, tree trunks, clay and rocks. The floor is strewn with earth and leaves, In the center there is a sculpure of a human being made from corn, clay, leaves, seeds and stones. The sounds are a mixture of live music (drums, tambourines and songs) with which the participants interact, and at the far end there is a spacially recorded mood peace. They are given different fruits and vegetables from the earth to savor. In the transition from earth to water they come upon a samall tank of water where they wash their feet, initiating them into the world of water.
· WATER: This initial section begins with a cement bridge in the open air, the floor and railings are covered with a plastic tube filled with water, giving the walk and aquatic feel. At the end of the bridge, the participant has two opions.
a) Here they glide down a slide into running water, plunging into frothy bubbles. The space is ecompased by acrylic walls over which water pours and the floor resombles a small pool. There is a fountain representing a watery eye, rimmmed with river rocks and guiding the participants up a stairway to the second opion.
b) This part is designed for those who cannot enjoy the water slide. Here they will find themselves immersed in rocks, sea creatutes such as snails, starfish,, acuatic plants floting in water. A humidifier is continually operating. In one of the walls there is a small round opening of 1.2m in diameter, into which the particant can put his head and absorb the sounds of waves and the sea breeze. In each section the music is full of sounds of the sea.
· WIND: This phase begins by ascending a small ramp (40cm.), where the participants are met by a guide who similuates a flight, encouraging them to fall onto a mound of cushions. They next pass through a space covered with waving clothes and ringing bells. The floor is coveres with a thick foam rubber which carries them to a clastic bed. Ten fans fill the area with air. New age music is palaying. They are given mints to tastel They leave the area through a tubular slide through which air is rushing, coming out onto a passage covered with caft paper and which guides them to the second floor. Testurized railings that radiate heat and wall torches guide their way.
· FIRE: They enteri into this pahse through a cushioned door, covered whth dry corn leaves. The effect of heat is created by red bulbs and electric heaters. Ot smells fo incense. A maze carries the participants between candles until they arrive at the enter where they find a textured, model volcano made from plater and covered with wax, from which emanate vapor and heat. There is also a human scupture with a hole in the heart that spews forth heat. The exit is through a tunel , with unravelling hemp rope. Live music, ceremonial singing and drums, emanate from the far end of the space.
As they have arrived at the final phase they enter into an atmosphere of peace and tranquility where they can relax before awaking. A guide sings smoothingly, harmonizing the four elements, accompanied by a flute and guitars. The floor is strewn with petals. There is an altar bearing symbolic objects invoking the four elements. In its center is a round mirror rimmed with flowers, in front of which the participants must present themselves before departing. "Remember everything that you have lived and felt, when you feel ready to leave the blindfold behind, look at the horizon and you will see natureīs most beatiful creation". On opening their eyes they find themselves confronted with their own image, completing the journey.
OBJETIVES
· To achieve the sensitizing of the entire body. · Activate the central nervous system, penetrating all the senses. · Promote contact between man and nature through awareness of the senses. · Instill an inclination for experimentationand an understanding of the relationship between the concrate and the abstract. · Create a consciousness fo our inner being.
GOALS AND RESULTS
· To make Sensorama a place dadicated to sense oriented to experimentation. · Follow up on the experiences of participants in Sensorama by investigating and creating. · Stimulate development of the senses in daily life.
The activities that we have made during this 5 years are the fallowing.
· The first Sensoramas were conducted with small groups in a forest. · Radio program on station WFM from Sundays to Wednesdays, at 11:00 p.m. over thre years. · "Sound is made tactile" Audiovidio of the Parque Hundido. Mexico City August 26, 1995. Perceptual reunion. · "Hands and Art" Collective exposition in Teccalli, Puebla. November 1995. "Sensorama: The four elements in motion". Iguana Azul. Mexico City. September 30, 1995 to the present.
The previous events have served as experience and information gatherers for the thesis: " Desymbolizer Process Sensorama" (Interaction between the symbolic and the nonsymbolic) by Hector Fernandez, director of Sensorama. In these encounters can be found the scientific bases, results, and hypothoses that have made possible this project and event. Statistically, the majority of those involved in Sensorama adat their form of seeing and feeling, reevaluating their senses as the touchstones of discovery. They embark upon a new relationship between information and experience.
There is a conference program to share all this knoglage that we have achive giving a theorical view, called " How the Sensorama process influnces sense awareness and the relation between experience and information, intelectual sensation," Which touches on the following points.
a) The actual state of culture an sensual perception. b) That which cannot be symbolized but rather transmited between language an stimuli. c) Interaction between form and content. d) Results of Sensorama, structure of Sensorama. e) What happens at the significant sign level, and experience and information. f) Proposals for some sensoramic experiments to be coducted at home. g) To go beyond the senses by going through them, to have an extralinguistic experience.
WE ARE LOOKING FOR
The people that is creating Sensorama is looking for places such as museums, cultural and art fundations, national parks, ecological reservs, to make our instalations, for people that is interested in perception and share with us the importance of its difussion in our sociaties. We need suport to keep this project moving, developing and promoting. Hope your institution consider Sensorama as and intersting and beatiful creation to be part of. The presentation of the four elements in motion that we are doing now can change depending on the interets that we may have in common, cintific, artistic, ecological. Cause one of our objetives is to change the presentation every 6 months. The next one we are preparing is about "birth and death".
INTRODUCION:
We consider that language is a sybolic substitute of experience. Maybe it has been substituted by a broken symbolism, that ancient homeostasis experience-symbol, incoditicable code that gave impulse to the continium creation. It is a fact that the way in wich we integrate to this world is by symbolization and in a very demeritated grade by experimentation. The means of communication, the way we learn, develop, transform and comunicate, has taken man to a external evolution (simbolic) and this has propiciated an homeostatic unbalance at the internal development. We start our investigation with Mr. Pierce, about a practice of the experiential universes and a critic to the excess of symbolics as substitute of the experience. "The called musement, wich defines a process in which the mind searches for some conection between the two or trhe experiencial universes (ideas, crude reality and signs). This wall between the experiential universe maybe will overwholm that conventional semantic when it joins the big boundaries of the antipodes ( below the and obove signs). that will be the result of this proposal, the situation is present the unbalance of experience-sign, language-no language, which propiciates the necesity for investigation if this is the cause of the paralisis in the homogenic development between the comunicable and uncomunicable. Rousseau in his investigation of the sensitive reason metions " All that is introduced in the human intelects passes through the senses, the prime reason of man is sensitive an that is the basis of the intelectual reason, so of our first teachers in philosiphy are our own feet, hands and eyes, to substitude with books our senses is not teaching us to think but to take advantage of our neighbours reason; to belive much and not knowing nothing. We are trying in this proyecto to know by the individual experience a little. Let us remember that we are not studyng the senses in this investigation but its worth as a process of intuation, its transmition and its possibility of integration to a common language , the interaction of sensitive reason and the intelectual reason. Itīs a little bite like beeing childs again, the childhood is a creative periof of time, it is when thereīs a balance between the experience and the symbol, because he doesnīt absorve what culture says, instead he absorves what he experiences, the world is not only what is told to him , but what he lives... this balance is broken and life is more what culture and language says , and the subject stops experiencing giving up almost totally only to the signs, not able to go over what language limits or unlimits. Sensorama is a desimolizer process that based on sensorial privations makes up to put a crisis in the comunicative symbolic, comon language ways... because iti encaunters the subject with a reality more experienced, more referenced, to which he is used to stimulating this sensitive reason, this concrete world, this experiential universe that the subject has in the childhood.
Sensorama makes in the subject the investigation and with this the concience to resignificate things from his experience and not from his language. It was proved that the practice in the weakering of the language estructures by sensorial privations creates a symbolic-experience, sign-meaning, form-content fusion.
Precisely it is the experience the point that articulates and starts the channing of learning and development. The excess of sign and information, that means our actual way of life, the deprizing of expression content has made possible for the human being to catch an excess of information against a minimum of real experience. Umberto Eco mentions it when he says " It results of a theory of codes that is interested basically by signs as social forces".