MULTI-SENSORY EXPERIENCE
Guy Laliberte, the founder of Cirque du Soleil, was asked his opinion on performance in public spaces. He said:
"There are two ways to transform the public space. Either through a fixed art landscape-a sculpture or an architectual environment-or through people taking over an environment and creating interaction in it. Animating a public space can be active or passive. (Spectacle)"
The ability to animate a space is key in creating a multi-sensory experience. My interpretation of the term is designing a method of engaging multiple human senses using sight, speech, movement, physicality and dimensionality, or sound as means to communicate with and inform the public audience.
This engagement is accomplished, on one hand, by flash mobs. An example is one that took place at Grand Central Station, NY, where a mob of people stood freezing in one spot for a minute before moving on like nothing happened. This created a dialogue among the public spectators. The absence of movement or sound was enough to create awareness in a space where constant activity is the norm. The founder of flash mobs in New York and editor at Harper's Magazine, Bill Wasik, said that what he was trying to achieve in creating his events was to "distinguish between what was performance and what was life."
Another example of engaging all forms of the human sense are massive festivals where people are encouraged to fling water, powder, or food at each other in a citywide celebration. Examples of this is Holi in India, and the Tomatina Festival in Bunol, Spain. These events are better described as spectacles, and have more to do with religious ceremonies or rituals than with designed public interventions like flash mobs. The value behind these events is mass numbers of people being united for a period of time, where a community develops temporarily to celebrate a full sensory experience.
My point of entry was to investigate how to utilize the capacity of working within the physicality and dimensionality of a space and animate an existing space using people as designed elements moving through it. It was an interesting design challenge that required studying a proposed site, the public that moved through it, and subverting those factors to introduce new ideas that would create a new experience being in the same site. |
dirtpiles & oasis 
