VESITILA - AQUATIC
Marianne Decoster-Taivalkoski

ARTIST STATEMENT

Paying attention to what surrounds us here and now using all our senses can be a way to live our relationship with the world very intensively, and enrich our quality of life. Immersion in virtual worlds, or artificial realities to use Myron Krueger terms, can be seen as an exploration of new relations between our emotions, actions, reactions and their consequences in these new worlds. Could these experiences wake our awareness to the here and now? Could they operate in our thinking and feeling bodies the elaboration of new perceptions of the real world?

Some people consider the body as limiting humans in their capacities, as obsolete and inadequate for the tremendous technological progress we are living through at the moment and in the future. They invocate the fact that virtual medium is a disembodied one and therefore a place for freedom from the flesh. My aim is to challenge this belief and use the very same media involving our whole body; I want to play with our perceptions and conceptions of the materiality of the real world through experience in virtual sensitive environments. I don’t think we can gain a feeling of freedom by denying our bodies, by separating our minds from our bodies. My practice of mime made me realize how much my body is involved in producing my perception of the world, in expressing it and in communicating with others. For me body and mind — if one absolutely wants to see here two entities — are irrevocably interwoven so that they form a whole.

If the feeling of freedom is seen as an essential element for creativity and innovation and thereby contributing to the empowerment of human capacities; I believe we can access to this feeling of freedom by giving our bodies space and time to move according to our imagination, following our sense of exploration in a different world, listening to our emotions and feelings. Forcing the body to reproduce certain patterns, models or references would be contradictory to this aim. I see in the personal ways of moving each one of us has, the expression of an intimate aspect of the self that I like to respect as it is. In the sensitive environment I’m building, there is nothing like a right or a wrong movement. I try to find a technique that would avoid any kind of systematization in the analysis of the movement expressiveness. The interaction system should allow and answer to any kind of movement without associating it roughly with a certain type of feeling. The system should be as adaptive as possible, which is not the case yet in this first version of “Aquatic”. The meaning emerges from the interaction between the participant and the sensitive environment; the meaning is not ready build in the system. I chose to concentrate my efforts on movement dynamism, movement quality in other words, more than movement shape.

When building a particular atmosphere through sounds and light effects merged with the interaction, I try to enhance movement creativity by stimulating our material imagination, as Gaston Bachelard defines it in his books related to poetry and the four basic elements. This imagination works on a very deep level, recalling the first material experiences we had as children with the concrete world.

In this work, among the aspects of the element water I chose those, which refer to the idea of Flow… Continuity… Life… For the moment I let aside the aspects associated with death and violence, and focused on associations where water is felt as the fluid source of life; where running water gives the sensation of continuity and eternity; where sitting next to a stream procures a feeling of serenity. I hope this atmosphere will invite participants to be transported by an interior reverie and interact through free gestures and movements in this sensitive environment. “Aquatic” plays with multisensorial images that we have gathered through our lives when experimenting water in the real world. This images are stored deep in our body memory, a memory dealing with our empirical experiences of the material world. This body memory is stimulated in “Aquatic” by the interaction, the relation between our movements and the sounds and light effects they provoke. The cause and effect relation in “Aquatic” is quite peculiar. It forms a virtual world that is not intending to simulate the real one but only recalls some aspects of it.