FuturePerfect

New York Premiere

Exhilarating and meditative, Kurt Hentschläger’s stroboscopic, mind-altering ZEE pushes the boundaries of perception and creates an intense audiovisual journey. This is the latest installation by Hentschläger, known for constructing immersive environments that fuse sound, video, performance, and technology. ZEE had its New York City premiere in October 2009, and was FuturePerfect’s inaugural event.

Entering ZEE, the visitor is immediately absorbed in a vortex of dense, odorless fog that completely obscures the walls, floor and ceiling. Individuals freely roam this environment with the help of ropes, while flickering light filters through the haze, inducing spatial disorientation and visual “distortions”. All the usual cues that contribute to depth perception—texture, shadow, size, perspective—are erased, returning each spectator, as it were, to a state of “tabula rasa”, where one’s perceptual framework is reset and then recalibrated. A droning soundscape creates an almost tactile aural field, intensifying the experience and shifting dynamically according to changes in the color, light and frequency.