Photo: © Quentin Chevrier

Retinal persistences

"When I discovered this work, I thought I would stay there for ten or fifteen minutes, no more.
In the end, I spent more than an hour there, I was so hypnotized.”  It is indeed difficult to recover
from such a vision, undeniably the most striking of this new edition of the KIKK Festival, because
it is potentially the most excessive, the most intense – the most disturbing even, no doubt.
By Maxime Delcourt, October 29, 2024, Fisheye Immersive.


Set in pitch-darkness, SUB is a meditative, yet dramatic work. The pitch black space of SUB is
interrupted, in intervals and for parts of seconds only, by bursts of animated light forms and
amorphous patterns. Returning back into darkness, ghostly retinal after-images inhabit visitors
retinas, slowly shape-shifting and fading, until the next eruption of light.

The ambient, eclectic soundscape of SUB diffuses throughout both darkness and moments of light. 

With the work's gestalt both initially unsettling and then increasingly hypnotic, visitors are invited
to drifting off into an ambiguous state of sensory deprivation and - overload.

Before entering, the audience must leave behind their phones and other light emitting devices.
This is to prevent light pollution in the installation space and put on hold device interactions.
SUB has no beginning or end, visitors may enter at any time and stay as long as they so desire.
Depending on one's position in space, visual and sonic impressions will vary substantially.

SUB is the second composition for darkness, after SOL, 2017. It is part of a series of
phenomenological environments, with FEED, 2005 and ZEE, 2008.
Due to the phenomenological nature of the work, video documentation is not available.
The photos below depict ~1⁄3 sec moments of light, before retinal after images, which

Credits:
+SUB production credits

Reviews:
+The Splendid Phenomenology of Hentschlägerian Voids, by G. Roger Denson

Photos / Stills: