SENSEfactory assembles an international team of renowned artists and researchers working on new approaches using immersive performance concepts inspired by interface design, olfactory art, computer sound, architecture, and artificial intelligence. Their goal is to create an installation-based performative venue which takes the visitor on a journey through a landscape of sound, light, colours, odours, abstract projections, vibrations and pneumatic architecture, and in which visitors find themselves in a constant state of metamorphosis.

This interdisciplinary sensory obstacle course is a present-day version of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s 1923 utopian vision of a theatre of “form- and motion-based processes.” The various zones in the installation are surrounded by projection screens that display visualised visitor data. These combine the sensory elements found in Moholy-Nagy’s envisioned media – an inflatable, pneumatically controlled room which continually changes depending on the viewers present. For example, there is an olfactory station which produces scents which have never been smelled before. There is a room with strings of LED lights whose behaviour and patterns are controlled by artificial intelligence as well as the visitors’ movement and position. And there is soundscape which is produced by miniature, wireless remote-controlled instruments. The team, partners and venues are all international. The members of the artistic team include the US-American graphic designer and digital strategist Erik Adigard, the Norwegian-German olfactory artist Sissel Tolaas, the Canadian artist and AI researcher Sofian Audry, the American architect Alex Schweder, the German media-space developer Dietmar Lupfer, the German musician and sound artist FM Einheit, and the US-American-Canadian artist Chris Salter.

Artistic Direction: Dietmar Lupfer and Chris Salter
Architect: Alex Schweder
Sound Design: FM Einheit
Graphic Concepts/Design: Erik Adigard
Olfactory Design: Sissel Tolaas
Algorithms: Sofian Audry
Light Design: Alexandre Saunier

Performance for two humans and fifteen neural networks, in collaboration with Alex Saunier.

"SNN studies" is a thirty minute live performance composed for an ensemble of five moving head lights modified by lenticular lenses, six channels of audio, two human performers, and fifteen artificial neural networks that simulate the firing of neurons in the human brain. These artificial neurons control the speed, tempo and sequences of the moving head lights as well as the audio, all in real time. The result is an ever evolving, dynamic performance intertwining human organisms and artificial machines and reminiscent of the early son et lumiere experiments of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Walter Ruttman, or Thomas Wilfred – large liquid-like textures, pulsing forms and fragmented, grainy shapes whose changing movement conveys a sense of aliveness.

A tower of moving head lights is installed in the centre of the performance space. The five moving head lights are mounted in a vertical line so that they project five separate images on a wall or screen opposite the tower. The lights are able to rotate 180 degrees, thus sending their image to all four sides of the space. The light emitted is visually distorted by five custom analog lenses hanging in front of each of the five lights, creating a distinctive, non-digital visual experience.

As these ensembles of neural networks “perform,” Salter and Saunier react to them to alter how they learn sequences of light and sound. Those manipulations generate overlapping neuronal feedback loops that create a constantly evolving performance which moves from almost silence to a growing crescendo that culminates in rapidly fluctuating light, sound, and image at the borders of perception.