REVIEW: [Abandon Normal Devices] ZEE @ Fact Gallery, Liverpool

ZEE by Kurt Hentschägler
Fact Gallery, Abandon Normal Devices Festival, Liverpool
29 September - 27 November 2011

Kurt Hentschägler's immersive installation 'ZEE' was described by one viewer as "a world as viewed by a dying robot clone from the inside of a Turner painting..."

I was certainly not disappointed. ZEE was a spectacular multisensory experience, that really did made me question how the things I was seeing were happening in my brain. To date, it's one of the most wholly consuming artworks I have had the pleasure of seeing, and I went in twice.

On arrival, participants had to sign an agreement, as the flashing lights and other conditions inside the installation may cause panic, seizures and other slightly unnerving symptoms. We heard stories from the invigilators of people fainting, or having to make an early escape. So after signing my life away on a slip of paper, they took us to the entrance and briefed us on what not to do. On the first occasion, I was in a group of about five, the thought of there being other people there was quite reassuring at first. Once inside, it dawned on me that it would make no difference.

As soon as the door opens, billows of fog pour from the entrance, encasing and engulfing its participants one by one. The first shock is how dense the fog actually is. Nothing quite prepares you for the lack of sight and perspective; you are relying on your senses alone (which in this case aren’t useful or reliable). The only reassurance is the vague shadow in front of you that is the person in front of you. We have been told to keep our hands to a rope that will guide us in, and once inside we can choose to let go. The smoke gets heavier and thicker the further you enter and then the lights start flashing. At first it feels like entering a thunder cloud, where you see lightning before hearing the low tremor of thunder. The sound playing in the background is the low kind of drone that seems to go straight to your heart and back down through your feet. At this point, it does cross my mind that it feels like I'm going into a very sinister rave. Shortly after, the flashing increases aggressively. By this point I find myself staring at a million fractals of colour as if gazing through kaleidoscopic glasses. My vision jumps like TV static gone berserk. It’s the most jarring and overwhelming sensation I have ever experienced. You no longer have any sense of a depth of field and everywhere you look seems infeasibly flat in dimension at the same time. Normal rules of reality just don’t seem to apply. It was like someone had replaced my eyes with jerking television screens, exploding and bursting with colour that it hurt to look. It seems wrong to say I felt blinded when ironically it was due to the opposite, that the overload of light had my mind and senses reeling to keep up to speed. But that was my strongest thought whilst I was inside. I cannot see a thing. It is all consuming, swallowing everything in its wake.

After a minute or two of this, the natural instinct of panic sets in and I am tempted to run. But where to? You cannot seem to escape the feverish psychedelia that is playing out before you. Immediately you feel trapped in your own mind; a colourful tunnel vision, plummeting outwards and zooming inwards simultaneously. At times the colours seemed to converge into a mass, and the next second they hurtle with every colour imaginable. Whilst trying to control the irrefutable light headedness that comes with having your senses well and truly annihilated, someone next to me cries, “this would be an epileptic’s worst nightmare!”. And I damn well agree. This is certainly not an experience for the faint hearted.

You have no idea what exactly it is you’re seeing or experiencing and if anyone else is just as perplexed (or for better word disturbed) as you are. The guide tells us that the lack of senses means that our minds are on ‘auto-pilot’, trying to fathom the best it can from this bizarre situation. Therefore what we see is purely constructed from our minds, or what it can make of this spectacle anyway. This is proven when I play back a short video clip I recorded inside (out of curiosity) and I realise that what I saw in there and what I see in the video are completely different. It is an amazing feat how ZEE penetrates you so psychologically through the simple manipulation of light, sound and environment. It invades every inch of your senses, imposing and even threatening when it feels impossible to run away from something you know may be just an illusion of your own mind. My main concern was the thought of becoming lost in this vast wilderness, left in this strange world alone with no idea of how to get back out.

On exiting the space, your eyes wildly try to adjust back to normality, and there's a strange frisson of adrenaline that's shared between our small group. It's then that I decide to go in again, in an attempt to understand what on earth I saw. On my second trip inside, I happened to be the only one waiting. Going in alone was a lot more nerve-racking, despite already having been in once. I think anyone's innate fear of being lost can never be rationalised. I knew logically that I couldn't get lost in that space, that despite whatever possible situation, someone would seek me out and save me from my blinded plight. In addition to that, the space could only be of a certain size, it wasn't exactly a wormhole that would suck me in. But the inexplicable fear still remains. The fear of letting go. The fear of stepping into the unknown and letting it do it's thing.

It is with these devices of light, sound and space, Hentschläger‏ manages to develop this unique sensory encounter. He uses opposing forces within the sensory spectrum to create a tailored experience impossible to reproduce from one person to another. If you read some of people's responses to this work, they are hugely varying. The work produces a contradiction between sensory overload and sensory loss. Even though there is a huge amount of stimulation; the loud drone, the mad lighting and the dense fog, it ends up working in opposition. In fact, we feel lost, blind, and hopeless as we wander through this alien environment despite having the ability to see. This is the magic undertone of his work, being able to give too much and too little at the same time, an impossible balance that is perfectly demonstrated in ZEE.

I think that the hardest personal obstacle to overcome is to just plunge yourself into the experience regardless, to allow everything to happen to you as it does, trying not to fight it as your natural instincts may be telling you so. There is a complete lack of control in how the work affects you and somehow you have to allow it to take its course. You make a choice to enter this installation but what happens after is completely inevitable, your senses literally take over.

ZEE is definitely the sort of artwork that gets me buzzing. Intense, hypnotic and vivid, ZEE certainly delivers a sensory overload like no other; an unforgettable experience that challenges sensory and visual perception. There’s no right way of explaining ZEE until you encounter it yourself, but alas is the beauty of the work in its inability to ever be replicated or fully understood.