Sweet and Savoury is an interactive installation that uses foley to create a surreal experience for the participants. The installation demonstrates how sounds can be associated to more than one object, and when combined to create specific settings, can create a totally different atmosphere and story that plays with the participant’s imagination.
Videos:
{Aftermath}
When I think of cyborgs, an image of a person with a mechanical limb or two, something way into the future where we have advanced technology. However, I never though of us as cyborgs with the tech we have now. The cyborgs I imagine have super abilities, like keen hearing or sight. But then again, the tech we have now allows us to do just that. It allows us to sense so much more, and the information it feeds us can alter the way we perceive the world around us. It can make you feel things that are not there.
In the reading, it mentions and talks about Opera for a Small Room, an installation created by the artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, who use tech to immerse their audience in the mechanical theatrics that tells a story of a man called R. Dennehy. However, the technology used serve to deceive the audience; it manipulates their senses into seeing things, to fill in gaps where they think should be filled. This gap would be Dennehy himself, who is not on set, but is perceived to be through recordings of his voice and shadows that mimic his silhouette. His narrations and every other prop meticulously put together on set each played a huge role in manipulating the audience’s experience. It was to an extent that they themselves feel as though the memories of Dennehy were their own. They were able to capture the presence of a body without one physically present in the room.
This power that technology holds in manipulating our senses, it is not exclusive to electronic devices. Something as simple as a book can do the same. As a speaker plays sounds that can cause us to imagine things, so can text of a story in a book; it is all up to how we process the information given. The text from the reading that described Opera for a Small Room was enough to make me imagine hearing and picturing the installation, so much so that I just had to do some research and look it up to see if what I imagined was correct (I found a video documentation and it was amazing and better than I expected).
Overall, I do agree that technology can have great control over our perceptions over what is actually happening in reality. And yes, it can be dangerous, but there is so much more it has to offer that makes it worth the risk exploring.