Experiential Art

Senzorium design to touch all senses.

Small hidden surprises in a forest or park will make people wonder.

How I fell in Love with the Senzorium.

I was already experimenting with experiential art when I visited one build by Utrecht based Marion Jacobse. She build one, with a lot of friends, over 20 years ago for her birthday in an old unused courthouse, creating a whole route through the building. An amazing moment was, when I came across a waterfall spanning the hallway. The rule was, you weren’t allowed to turn back, so I mentally prepared to get very very wet. Upon stepping forward I found the waterfall fell across a glass door that opened up, showing the waterfall being attached to the door rather than the ceiling. I followed my path dry. Afterward I found that all people who had gone through the experience had completely changed faces. All stress was gone. I had never seen art do that before. I had me keep on exploring art crossing boundaries towards non traditional experiential driven installations, often making visitors participants or co-creators.

Here we offered people the ‘Hades experience’. Who was ready for it was rowed across the river to the underworld to meet Hades, the Greek God of the underworld. He would welcome you in the land of the dead…and offer you one extra chance to return to the living. The tone of this meeting was such that people often returned in silence and somewhat more grateful for the gift of life.

What is a Senzorium?

The Senzorium, or sensorium, is a rare art form aiming to create a conscious interaction with the visitor. It aims for the experiencer to be touched on all or most senses, rather than only the visual. It can be as small as a box on the wall, in which the participant can rearrange stuff, or it can be a whole building or even a whole park. In fact the whole world is a Senzorium. Whatever the theme or concept behind it, if offers (as far as I see it now) 7 things:

• It says to you: Be Here Now
• It makes you aware: You are part of the experience
• It reflects to you: You create your own experience
• It speaks to your whole being. It may stimulate all senses. Taste, smell, touch, sound may all be stimulated, or played with.
• It may stimulate head, heart, body and soul.
• It allows you the opportunity to play with(in) the experience and or the space and materials within it.
• It leads to (an experience of) wonder.

So in a way it’s both reflective and at the same time creating a physical here and now awareness. This can be done on a playful level, but also on deep metaphysical levels stimulating health or spiritual growth.

Before Banksy made his famous anti amusement park, I build, on an albeit much smaller, simpler, cheaper scale, a Spiritual Amusement Park, or at the least the entry. Enter by paying with karma. Across the terrain spread out signs to things like the emotional rollercoaster, the enlightened snack bar. For real we offered things like a Counter for Hero Quests and a Guru chair where whomever sat in it, would be the guru.

How to design a Senzorium?

The starting point can be anything. A park, a building, your imagination, a question or concept. I have build a purely meditation route, much like a jogger route with exercises in a park. Along the route things to smell, taste, feel, listen to where spread to pause or meditate at. I’ve set up experiences around a festival terrain to create comments on the festival or bring visitors into a different state. Think thing like a ‘Crying spot for men’, a ‘Complaining Bench’ (klaagbankje which is a thing in Dutch) for frustrated festival goers, a ‘Counter for HeroQuests’ where people could get missions for self development, an Altar for All Believes, where people could add their own symbols.

It works best for individuals or visitors in pairs. You may even design for solo or team walks. One can build senzoriums that can be run without actors/coaches in it, or ones heavily dependent upon them, more like performances. They work very well as part of large exhibitions, festivals, can be made by groups of friends or by collectives by highly paid artists for special purposes or even like a artistic escape room 3.0 experience, that goes for beyond puzzling.

Let’s explore the possibilities.

The ‘Counter for Hero Questions’ was dressed up as an Indian Street vendor. This forced people to bend over when talking to the salesman, thus creating more private space for the person in search of a meaningful mission.

Be Here Now

In a world full of images, messages, smells and sounds, a world that speaks to all your senses all the time the meaning and possibilities of art are changing. Added to it is a new dimension: that of experience.

Art can be used to make you feel, touch, be sensitive of where you are now. It can bring us back from the virtual television and computer worlds we sometimes seem to live in, back to the real world of the senses and of the magic possibilities that lie within it.

One way to get that effect is surprise. Create sudden shifts in understanding, experience through flipping expectations, like an apple tasting like licorice or a hallway you think is there, not being there at all.

It can help you to be here now and enjoy it. There’s a world of magical possibilities stored within that thought.

We are always interconnected with the world around us. Take food. It enters your mouth, mingles with bacteria, influences your health, preferably improving it. With movies it’s trough sight and sound that your emotions are awakened. But most often you forget you are part of the experience. You seem to disappear in involvement. Rarely movies or art wakes you up to the now, even when the story makes you cry.

In fact the beholder is the creator of the experience. The way you feel, think, your intentions, everything that is you, determines how you experience what you are part of. Would it be possible to reflect your attitude in such a way things can change? Would it be possible to turn the beholder into a conscious creator of the experience?

The Senzorium is a form of interactive art, that gives the participant the freedom to create his own work of art out of the experience. It can be heaven or hell, desert or a jungle full of life. The Serzorium is a container, the content is brought by the visitor. There are many practical ways this process can be started: with questions, food, playful stuff, paradoxes, etc. Tricking the visitor is one way to make it fun. What looks very dangerous may be very save. The most boring room, may hold the biggest gift, etc.

This seemingly lost man, became an item of a lots of discussion at a festival. Provocation without any clear answers works.

Imagine

One example of how it may be done…

Imagine you enter a garden through a sign: “You are about to be born anew.” Somewhere a voice whispers to you. Then you come upon two doors. One says the Dangerous Road, the other the Safe Road. You choose through which you follow your path. The Safe Road seams playful at first, colours like pink and yellow dominate. Then after a while the Barbie experience turns into a horror. A gigantic Barbie doll sprouts teeth. Candy seems poisonous and each moment a trap may betray your advancement. But nothing happens, only images. At the end is only one door left. It’s called the End. It’s the end of the experience.

The other road starts dark and dangerous. There are some traps easily avoided* if you pay attention. There is death and decay but it’s all natural. After that the road becomes more open and flowery and ends with a lot of choices to progress through. Each door has a name and one more gift after that. Like a door with ‘happiness’ written on it, there’s humour on the walls and nice beverages in a fridge. After that there’s a sign “through here the magical world. “ When you enter it’s the real world. You’ve gained freedom.

*) Depending on the agreement made with the visitor, and what can and needs to be insured, traps may include awfully tasting fruits, splashed with water or even paint, getting hunted by a horror actor, sudden sounds, lights going totally dark.

Whether just a natural trail with a few additions, a open frame with elements to play around with or a complete planned park, the senzorium can take almost any shape. I can speak to all aspects of being human.

Another, more simple, example was one that you entered blindfolded. You were free to do anything. Many people however turned out not even daring to feel around. They thus missed fluffy animals, awesome shaped wood art for the blind and other nice surprises. This shows how deeply this art form must be thought through.

“La Fruit de Mer” (French for Sea Fruit) You want fruit? Come and get it in the water.

Speaking to the body.

How to stimulate the senses in a Senzorium.

To have people experience this ‘being here and now’ we have to address the body. To speak to the body, is to speak to the 5 senses, by creating physical action. This can be provoked, forced and it can be done in very subtle ways. Think things like a staircase with irregular steps, a too low doorway, a water hose that needs to be avoided, flowers that smell, a bench halfway to sink into.

Play with possibility, involve an actor to play hide and seek or tag. Offer things to climb or jump over, invite fun with a swing, rest with a bed or a hole into a wall to look through. Any invitation to physical action should be there on purpose or framed as meaningful, even if it’s just touching, tasting, pushing a button or stepping over a threshold. Offer any action so, that the participant becomes aware. It’s there, it may be optional, but whatever action the participant takes, the decision is his or hers.

Offer things to smell. Play with smell: it looks like flowers, it smells like shit or the other way around. Lure, seduce or chase away with smells.

Offer things to eat, taste. Offer bitter, sweet, sour, salt and herbal/harty. Offer hot, cold. Offer natural things, great cooking, offer surprises for the tong, unexpected combinations. Offer the flavour of love.

Offer candy for the eyes. Offer shock, pleasantry. Stimulate imagination, reality, poetry or adventure. Show pictures, shapes, contrast, harmony.

Offer candy for the ears. Make people aware of sounds that are there. Add surprises, add music, add disturbances add silence. Use contrast and harmony.

Offer stuff to touch. Speak to the senses. Invite sensuality, trigger roughness, massage the body, offer softness, hardness, hot and cold. Offer natural and artificial.

A restaurant where people were offered experiences, like hugs or challenges, in response to their life questions.

Speaking to the Mind

Poetry, text, puzzles, riddles, paradoxes, illogical or alienating occurrences, images, questions, stories. Human culture is full of stuff that speaks to the mind. To me the best of those speak to a level deeper. They speak to the heart or the soul. They create inner experiences and involvement. The mind is but a servant, there to send the message onwards, even if it doesn’t understand. Curiosity, enchantment, bewilderment, puzzlement, feelings seem to me the things to aim for. Rational understanding is hardly an experience. Mindfulness is. Wonder is.

Graveyard for Lost Ideals. People were asked to write down and bury their lost ideals here. It made from an ugly spot of left over building materials, a spot rife with meaning. Open Up festival.

Speaking to the Heart

All senses are processed in the brain. Text, taste or touch go in and are in the brain processed into things like beautiful, yucky and or soft. Most emotions arise from the brain though judgement. ‘I hate you, so I don’t like what you do.’ Still sometimes things speak to the heart directly. You walk in the forest and suddenly a breathtaking view to a valley opens up. Good sex, great food have that too.

But how to get there? How to surpass the context? To shock seems an easy answer. To speak directly to the spirit is another. It’s all to about opening the participant up to the most essential of all human experiences: “hey, I am so very much alive!”

Thus to speak to the heart, one has to study the language of the heart. One has to know and understand by experience how the heart gets involved, touched when participating in processes. It can’t be just a trick. The better the attention, intention and focus of the artist, the more the participant will be able to experience.

This is not a senzorium, but it shows how use of nature, here morning fog, can transport people into wonder. This is on the edge of a small lake in England, not the edge of a cliff. Experience offered by Unknown Epic

How to build a Senzorium

• Whether you invite people by flyer, mail or only have an entrance it has to prepare people to enter with a open state of mind.
• There has to be a promise, that with that right state of mind a reward can be found within the experience. The creators have to know how to fulfill that promise by facilitating the journey without directing meaning or fixing outcome.
• Whatever the participant expects the possibilities and outcomes must be different. Play with expectations. In short they have to burn and make place for awareness and experiencing the moment. A senzorium is not about a trip trough beauty or a fixed journey like a commercial movie; it is a trip to reality and possibility.
• Everything must feel like it had attention and has meaning and purpose. No time to clean up the dung heap, then put a little crown on top of it. Does the trail cross a busy street, make it part of the experience, not a disturbance along the way.
• Activate all senses, activate into participation. If the participants can walk through a Senzorium like any walk, it’s not a Senzorium. Invite, ignite, trigger, trap, shock, play, tempt, lure, challenge, wake up participants to be part of the experience; to be alive.
• It’s not about filling the space, forest, room or window. It’s about opening up space for listening both inside and outside. The art lies within the open space.

What is the difference between a Maria statue and a Maria in a tree? Placement matters a lot. We dressed up a dung heap near this tree, we couldn’t get away with in time, with a little crown on top and a small poem in front of it. After people thought we put the dung heap there on purpose. Make sure to give everything meaning, or the feel of having had attention. This helps people get into a different state.

Good luck