An Immersive Interactive Cinematic Art Installation
directed by Laia Cabrera

in collaboration with performer Catherine Correa and visual artist Isabelle Duverger

Music and Sound design by Erica Glyn & Nana Simopoulos
Interactivity Design by Aniol Saurina Masó

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“Qualia” is a Film for installation and cinematic presentation about the transitory nature of life and our intent to grasp, capture the instant. Conceived as a triptych with a seamless projection mapping design covering 3 walls or panels (technical design attached), floor and motion tracking for full gesture responsive interactivity, creating an oneiric journey about remembrance, longing, choices, memories in act. Drawing from the body, faces, urban patterns, nature and remains of activity, the piece explores the multiple “I”, the duplicity and the phases of change in life. It is about love, loss, the pursuit of happiness and the journey of innocence and adulthood thought the eyes of a woman. Underneath these mirrored imageries lie many stories about limits, freedom and self-perception.

 

Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett once suggested that qualia was "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us". "What's it like to be?”, the ineffable, intrinsic and private experience of a perception in and of itself. Qualia is as "raw feels".

 

“Qualia” will be presented as an immersive infinite space video and ambisonic sound art installation, mapping feelings and experiences as avatars; an experiential interactive exhibit about perception and interpretation of our mental lives. The brain is an alchemist where memories are the bedrock of consciousness and the body is the vessel of our identity. The video installation art becomes a theatrical stage where things appear, move across, and then disappear, where awareness becomes attention and your brain fantasizes your conscious reality.

 

Experience is the new currency. I’ve seen of what it feels like to be alive in the world in 2020. But the final gaze is a visual poem, gravitational Qualia: anxiety shaped into Surrealism, a nightmare turned fantasy, spontaneous solidarity, feelings of solitude, suspension, an embrace, the beginning of a smile, a hand holding sand, falling and rising again. “Qualia” explores concepts of mental states, symbolism, and hope, creating a story that unfolds across a series of immersive interactive scenarios. The work uses color, motion, music, drama, humor, light and darkness to confound expectations, flattening space through animation and abstraction, or heightening the illusion of three dimensions.

 

I will collaborate with visual artist and animator Isabelle Duverger, choreographer and performing artist Catherine Correa, interactive designer Aniol Saurina Maso and composers Nana Simopoulos and Erica Glyn as well as dancers and actors for the filming process, and reach out to the scientific community. As a work of creation related to choreographic language, bioart and the scientific and sensory exploration of the theme, the piece uses digital tools for cinematographic language and interactive dramaturgy.

 

I want to bring the audience an alternative experience where they are no longer passive spectators and actively enter the very heart of the piece where ‘universal time’ continues to exist in parallel with an inner perception of time — a back door — intimately associated with our sense of personal identity and unshakable condition that the future is still “open” to our chosen actions. 

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 Conceived as a crafted film with sequences of slow-moving, dream-like scenes and symbolic images, surrealism and hyperrealism, nature, neurons, micro and macro merging together creating a story that unfolds across a series of immersive interactive scenarios. The work uses color, motion, music, drama, humor, light and darkness to confound expectations, flattening space through animation and abstraction, or heightening the illusion of three dimensions.

 

An ordinary tableau becomes a dreamscape, the brain is an airport, a train rail. The mind is a magician, The body is the self, an archetypal memory of the collective unconscious, the necessity to deify the singular, the culture of the One?

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