is a participatory public event in which visitors were invited to take part in immersive activities across two spaces, a red room and a yellow room. These were staged to challenge perceptions through sensory stimulations that included coloured lights, variations in textures, flavours and sounds. First, visitors were blindfolded and taken, one at a time, to the red room by students dressed in lab coats. Once inside the room, they removed their blindfold and were presented with a set of sensory stimuli. Then, visitors were blindfolded again and taken to the yellow room where the process was repeated with a different set of sensory stimuli.
Following the experience of the two rooms, participants were taken to a third space and provided with a creative toolkit to express their phenomenal experience of the red and yellow rooms. The toolkit included plasticine for visitors to make three-dimensional representations of their experience and articulate its emotionality. Finally, they were asked to mark their overall impression on a circular diagram adapted from James Russell’s Circumplex Model of Affect in psychology. In Russel’s model emotions are organised across four concepts - arousal, pleasure, sleepiness and misery - represented around a circle to highlight their interrelation. The event was conceived as a dynamic environment where sensory phenomena were used to stimulate imagination and explore the subjective variability of perception.
Expressions by participants.
Reference
Russell, James. (1980). A Circumplex Model of Affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.