Reinterpretaion of blackout – how closely does television affect me by Richard Kriesche (1974/75)

How acts the communication medium, in particular in the current form of VR glasses, which are available in the meantime at any Italian motorway service area, on reality and our communication. The audience has to use VR goggles and headphones, so it seems to enter the same space like in Richard Kriesche’s blackout and is in an identical state of reality. This time even more congruent, yet more diverse than it could possibly be. In passivity and immobility, white noise is acoustically and visually projected.

In terms of signal theory, this represents the simplest stochastic process. Exposed to this for a few minutes, each individual experiences the Ganzfeld effect, hallucinations produced by perceptual deprivation. Through movement, different frequency bands, tones and patterns can be extracted from the noise, very elementary forms and sounds. Thus, the audience is free to generate by passivity complex hallucinations or activly seeming to generate rudimentary forms.

In the current Installation one can experience two versions. An interactive VR program for the Oculus RIFT SDK1, in which white noise as image and sound can be modulated by head movements, and a Google cardboard prototype, which uses the cardboard as glasses/projection screen to modulate a whiteout with noise. The Ganzfeld effect should occur after concentrating for a while on the noise center. l

As Günther Anders writes in The Antiquity of Man, those who are put to death can choose whether they want their last meal sweet or sour.