Immersive experience ruled by user and co-ruled by the cellular automata of John Conway known as the Game of Life. A project developed at Atelier de Recherche Interactive, ENSAD, Paris. I like to think it as a cybernetic experience.

Our eyes half-closed, looking both inside and outside, our perception shifts to an audio-tactile dimension; favoring the awareness of the body, the presence of our selves and the wakefulness of being. Ad occhi socchiusi is an invitation to a certain feeling, to a certain perception of our-selves. Due to its aesthetic system, Ad occhi socchiusi is an experiment on cybernetics as a science of regulation and communication between living beings and machines.

The participant soon becomes an “interactor” simply sitting, resting and breathing. He learns to use his body as an instrument that produces the sound that he can hear. In public space the interactive experience is exclusively aural, but the full recording of it (audio and video) can be downloaded at home.

The experience leads from the chaotic state to the “birth” of a virtual entity that take over the user’s interaction in creating sounds. This process passes from disorder (chaos) to organized patterns (order), according to the rules of the Game of Life de John Conway. The crucial element in treating the information is the correlation of the cardiac, resonant and chromatic frequencies, according to their consonance or dissonance.

The system is retroactive and generative, and the notion of cycle is deep-rooted within it. This cycle is sensitive to the past: every audiovisual instance is the result of the system’s condition at the time of the experience as well as previous states.