TERRA INCOGNITA

No man is an island / Entire of itself

John Donne

...the unit of survival is the organism plus environment. We are learning by bitter experience that the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself.

Gregory Bateson

In a wider sense, humans and nature share the same body.

Chen Xia and Martin Schönfeld, “A Daoist response to climate change,” in the Journal of Global Ethics, August 2011, 202

Love the world as your own self; then you can truly care for all things.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching: Chapter 13

There's a Seachange at work in 2017 as we head into new territories. chroma.space are running two projects this year.

The Terra Incognita collaboration between Prof David Rudrauf and Katharine Vega which begins with a three week residency at the Flux Laboratory in Geneva May 2017. Performances of the R&D and first prototype of the networked Virtual Reality project "Seachange" will run in late May at a showing at Flux Laboratory and for the NCCR Affective Sciences Conference. Mystical traditions, phenomenologists and artists from all ages have developed languages to map intersubjectivity. This interdisciplinary collaboration across art and science explores interpersonal relationship and creatively communicating supra-sensory experience. This is a long-term research project exploring collective experience and the potentials for Virtual Reality to bring richer understanding of human experience and Artificial Intelligence.

Island is a project for Balance Unbalance 2017 and Another Way Madrid: a piece of interactive land art and a film for a 360 Dome and VR experience. A participatory narrative that focuses on the islands of the Pacific and the reciprocal relationship between heaven and earth, the project blends Virtual Reality with the real world through storytelling and live actions inviting audiences to act and dance for the planet. This work is a part of Of the Spheres - a project that opened with a 360 Dome piece Heliosphere in 2013 - and explores what it is to live on the earth and below the stars.

_The horizon, the sea, the island: it depends from which perspective you project. From space, planet earth appears a wild island paradise of life against the empty void. The journey calls: from the uniquely personal to the universal, through the black night of machine terrors and the song of wild distant stars. A journey to meet what is real. You are not alone. Across the waves: a beacon’s flashing •

image credit: Christian Krupa