Immersive Performance. Video, Fog, Stroboscopes, Pulse Lights, Surround Sound



FEED.X is a performance set in an artificial yet physical environment without human performers in the flesh. It’s visceral and dramatic in nature.

The precursor FEED, was conceived in 2004, as a special creation for the Theater Biennial in Venice and designed to convey a duality of both real and rendered / virtual space.

FEED.X, now, makes less of a sensual distinction between the real and the simulated, instead staging a more unified, though still hybrid reality, wherein boundaries continue to collapse. This is the new prosthetic hybrid real: physical yet also simulated, natural yet also constructed.

The performance passes through two seemingly opposite stages.

The first half of FEED.X – delivered in a traditional, frontal screening setup - is misleading in relation to later events. Amidst an ambient surround sound scape, the audience follows a virtual camera moving through a 3D rendered  architecture, to eventually encounter floating humanoid figures, weightlessly moving like a flock of birds on drugs, following what appears to be a semi-autonomous, semi conscious choreography. The figures race, float and crash into one other in an erratic, gravity shifting world, each giving off drone like sound through- and while moving.

About 20 minutes into the show, true still to the original FEED, the second part of the work transforms the venue into an otherworldly amalgam of thick, artificial fog and intensely bright pulse- and strobe light. FEED.X points to the limits of human perception, employing both sensory deprivation and sensory overload, to immerse its audience in a seemingly infinite, kaleidoscopic space, a realm of pure light and sound. The work is often described as an unusually emotional and sublimely mesmerizing experience.

A digital-analogue sound-scape, built from visual pattern - strobe to sound - feedback, combined with ample sub-bass, heightens the loaded atmosphere.
Hentschlager always performs the second part live, mostly improvised, shaping the flow of light and sound via physical control interfaces.

Due to the phenomenological nature of the work, video documentation is not available. Available photos depict moments from the first part and the transition into the second part only.