Tactile-audio-visual experiment
Tactus
TACTUS - is VR-glasses, audio, ten actors and the Spectator - "test driver" of the project.
Where will the interaction of VR-picture, audio environment and tactile sensations lead us? Where are the boundaries of our tolerance and trust? What can be open in us by such a synthesis of different tools of influence?

We are looking for the answers to these and perhaps other questions in the TACTUS experiment.


In may 2018 on the Night of Museums, a new pilot project TACTUS was unveiled by an audiovisual team Limyè. Its author Maria Amelenkova is trying to reveal its essence.

"I assume it is necessary to structure the story for the topic being multi-layered enough to crumble in it…»


Maria Amelenkova
author
TACTUS is a closed space, VR glasses, audio content and tactile impact of ten artists on one person - our test subject.
Background of TACTUS
I was lucky enough to be a bearer or an owner (hard to say which is better) of several impact instruments at the same time. Namely they are sound engineering background, acting schooling and experience of a video artist in the team of Polina Limye. All these skills almost always worked separately, however and with each new task they persistently appealed to me in their desire to finally act mutually to solve one common concern.
CHANCE
This year in May on the multifunctional stage Skorokhod (which is a great friend of our team) there popped up a need for an installation with a projection (this is what we usually create) in a space of three and a half and with a shortest possible time. However, the conditions were completely inappropriate for our regular means of representation. And there the stress came into play.. Unusual limits and hard deadline conditions - well, they are the kings of productivity and success! They determined the result: the entire current store of instruments finally shook their wings, conspired and gave out the first synthesized fruit of nine-year excavations in the fields of adjacent areas. A strange mix was born to be called....


STRUCTURE
  • The tactile component
    of the project grew out of theatrical school training. To clarify I can only judge about this from the standpoint of my personal experience in this situation being extremely subjective. The effect of multiple touches is something like this: the initial thirty seconds of interaction your brain does not understand what is happening to the body. Your bodily feeling at the same time is that of entire absence of any real life experience. You can not match what is happening to any accurate or specific analogues. And, being with closed eyes, without the ability to learn the reality, our consciousness begins to engage in creativity. It tries to live up to what is happening around. It does not worth voicing specific associations of anybody from my team, because the spectrum will be from plasma enveloping you into a cocoon to a milkmaid lying down on your shoulder in a haystack (the milkmaid is not a joke by the way). So, consciousness creates.



  • Video and sound
    are added to this training so as not to destroy the state of creating personal images, they are devoid of specifics and only lead you along emotional rails in the right direction…
  • Result
    The mechanics of the experiment is simple: we completely isolate a person from reality, trying to replace the basic sensations.
GOAL
The most important is always to describe the goal, the ultimate goal, if any. Now in conversation with you for the umpteenth time I face the options of whether to tell you what effect we are expecting from the project or to remain silent, not to force a potential participant of the experiment into our feelings. Perhaps this time it will be neither fish nor fowl.

We approach the experiment with the main single rule, which in itself is the carrier of the goal and our main idea. Long live the pathetic speech, but still ... we interact from a position of Respect, Care and Love for the person who trusted our hands…

Only by giving a sense of security to our "spectator", "listener", "person in our solicitude" we will be able to lead him towards a new sensation of not only our micro-world, but perhaps to the whole world itself. After all it is in a sense of security and safety, a person is capable of creating to much a greater extent than in a forced protective closed position, in which we all more or less exist. We want to allow a sense of security at least for a couple of minutes before and after the "exit"…

TACTUS is an experiment about synthesis attempting to solve the problems of "What can be born at the junction of these three components? Is there a chance to go to another level of sensations??? Can we predict the effect of such taboo and intimate interaction as touch?"
RESULT
Too early about it. Each of the twenty-two test subjects spoke to the camera after the experiment (this is a part of the process - we need to understand how TACTUS works). People sometimes delivered a text not voiced to the team and only sounded in their heads, and it was....mmmm.... important. TACTUS works, even at this stage, when we ourselves do not fully understand its mechanisms.

I would also love to add: this process is important not only for the "spectator". Our team turned out to be a small miracle for me. It is ready to share with all of you. Everyone has enough strength and desire to pacify and reboot, everyone has a good reason to be present here. I want to go on working. I wish, sorry to say" to bring into the world" again, I am eager to animate new technologies, and I assume that the "future" is not entirely the way to the world of indifference, but there are options in addition to the Black Mirror. .

I need to see where TACTUS will lead us – because there are so many ways of development in this simple seven-minute ACTION. Now we are waiting for volunteers to have a "dialogue" again, people who will tell us what we have done, what TACTUS is.



Team
Performers (executers): Julia Grishaeva, Natalya Naumova, Nadezhda Moshkina, Alexander Khromov, Alexandra Boston, Svetlana Kudyan, Denis Polevikov, Anna Olshanetsky, Polina Nazarova, Julia Shishova, Fedor Ludinov, Maria Amelenkova

VR consultant: Victor Komarovskikh-co-founder of Tvori

Contacts
Next event:
Phone: +7 (981) 961-64-35
E-mail: hello@limye.space

Saint-Petersburg, Russia