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 black void 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 dark-ness 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. 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.

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. 

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: