Qualia – You Matter to Me

“Qualia” is an immersive video and sound installation about our longing for connection to nature, through consciousness, awareness, and agency.
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Presented at Jersey City Theater Center October 13-15, 2023
as part of JCAST 2023 and Prelude Festival 2023 – Segal Center CUNY
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“Qualia” is a sensory voyage where the line is blurred between the physical and the digital world, between the real and the imaginary. The gaze is a visual poem, gravitational Qualia: anxiety shaped into Surrealism, mythology, a nightmare turned fantasy, spontaneous solidarity, feelings of solitude, suspension, an embrace, the beginning of a smile, a hand falling and rising again, time and the fates.

Conceived as an immersive projection mapping design using cinematographic language and interactive dramaturgy, “Qualia” explores concepts of mental states, symbolism, and hope, creating a story that unfolds across a series of immersive scenarios drawing from the body, faces, urban patterns, nature and remains of activity. Underneath these mirrored imageries lie many stories about limits, freedom and self-perception.

An ordinary tableau becomes a dreamscape, the brain is an airport, a train rail. The mind is a magician, the body is the self, giving audience an alternative experience where they are no longer passive spectators and actively enter the very heart of the piece where ‘universal time’ continues to exist in parallel with an inner perception of time — a back door — intimately associated with our sense of personal identity and unshakable condition that the future is still open to our chosen actions.
The brain is an alchemist where memories are the bedrock of consciousness.
The piece uses choreographic language, fragmentation, bioart, color, motion, music, drama, humor, light and darkness to confound expectations, dream-like scenes and symbolic images, flattening space through animation and abstraction, or heightening the illusion of three dimensions.
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The immersive experience – environmental video sculpture – is designed as a wide wall with smaller streams spread across, seemingly in random positions creating video spaces. Using the concept of ideasthesia, a bridge that metaphorically links rational abstractions, we open a dialogue between the different film streams, extending the installation in time and space.

Directed by Laia Cabrera & Isabelle Duverger
Original Musics composed & arranged by and Erica Glyn
Featuring performing artist Catherine Correa