Parenthetical Windows: A Project on How Artificial Light and Sound Architecture Affect Human Perception on Norms

Parenthetical Window is a project that engages scientific research in human perception providing a platform for users to experience their own limits and needs in their individual circadian rhythm. The presentation focuses on a case study in a community of dancers where the individual needs in light and darkness (activity and rest) are being measured. With the use of gesture recognition devices (e.g. Myo), visual and audio parameters are triggered in order for a chart of a “movement choreography”/ vocabulary to be analysed. The first draft of the research evaluates whether the user can distinguish artificial from natural stimuli and detects common and individual needs by measuring heart pulse and body temperature. The focal point here is light and how light affects human perception while at the same time the perception of sound and how gesture can provide the best possible cognition of actual needs in keeping the internal rhythm when we adjust to artificial environments. A history of how architecture and technology made our perception flexible in what is real and aesthetically beautiful is also documented by individual dancers in interviews. This research endeavours to project the need to engage all senses in multi-sensory projects, and manifests how sound is connected in its absence (where only noise and ambience stimulates the senses), trains the body to regain spatiality, embodied cognition, and how other senses interact in this recalibration. One focal point is the connection of light and artificial soundscape as well, as long as sound is structured (therefore artificial) as a compositional model. The research takes into account the time circle of 24 hours in four groups (morning, noon, evening and night) and proceeds the results of all the above for an artistic project that values all these for the construction of a final installation that focuses on the construction of a dark room that provides artificial stimuli through a window with only artificial information. The abstract translation of sound to image through artificial light is a common endeavour in the history of arts and its aesthetics, since light is a form that adapts natures’ properties and modifies the artificial environment as a stage direction, implying at the same time mood and modifying it in collaboration with sound. Having evaluated how this affects the body and human perception in this particular time that we experience nowadays (where artificial is in fashion) what we mostly attempt to value and evaluate within this research and installation is the enantiomorpous pattern of natural to artificial, aiming from the initial stage/ level to organize and manifest what the body perceives as real, and where it measures fatigue and stress instead of calmness and satisfaction, aesthetic as well as corporeal.