Alpha Channel, 2004 - video documentation - 03'32 | 6.5MB

Alpha Channel is an immersive audio-visual environment, which is to be 'viewed' with closed eyes. It is a sensory integration environment. The frequency based audio modulates the lights discretely, causing eyes to move within the ganzfeld (total field) using the viewer's eyelids. Alpha Channel is a physical and radically subjective viewing experience, which challenges the objective viewer to submit the experience, which appears rather aggressive from the onset. Once the decision has been made to have the experience, however, a whole different interpretation of the situation can emerge. I the context of visual art it challenges, not only the viewer's expectations of seeing art, but the actual act of seeing.

The audio challenges spatial perception and makes use of a neural acoustic phenomenon sometimes referred to as a binaural beat. A binaural beat is not heard in the ordinary sense of the word. It is a brain-stem response which is perceived as an auditory beat when frequencies cross nodes and can synchronize the braint hemisphers and theoretically, be used to entrain specific neural rhythms and thus states of consciousness and even physical well-being.

Though the audio track for the installation, Phase Lock, started out as a purely Alpha Frequency composition, I took quite a few liberties with deviating it from strictly theraputical or new age aspirations.

For the Noise Cape festival in Den Haag, I was able to expand the system by adding 2 more lights and installing in an abandoned airfield watchtower. The idea of being in a building designed for watching the skies and being encouraged to close one's eyes, added to the perversity of the situation. Thanks go to Dennis Tyfus for recomending me to the organizers of Noise Cape.

The space that I installed in for RUSH was an old, concrete walled basement of what once was an auto garage. The floors were dirty and the room smelled a bit like oil and gas, adding a sense of foreboding with associations to some sort of interrogation room.

/chris.musgrave.org/projects
<PREVIOUS | NEXT>