SENTRIX

The SENTRIX is a public interactive installation completed by a team of five high school students from the Art Hope Foundation during 2014 Summer Taiwanese Festival.

The title of this work references the Sci-Fi movie “Matrix”, in which illusion is created via artificial means. And this project seeks to explore the six human senses: sounds, taste, touch, sight, smell, and consciousness, and to visualize these inborn physiological abilities through an alternative and creative approach.

The idea behind the project first started when students from Art Hope Foundation wanted to raise awareness about the large amount of sensual deceptions in the world. How do our experiences occur? How do we experience events? The answer is: the senses. With our senses we see the sunrise, we hear the birds chirp, we smell the fresh flowers, we taste the freshly baked bread and we touch the fur of our pets; we also have the power of consciousness to remember all these experiences. But what happens when those senses are tricked? What happens when our senses tell us one thing is happening when in reality, something entirely different is taking place? is the product of their attempt to express this idea.

Taste

We are being tricked by the food we have been consuming: there are too many artificial factors, and we often fail to define the real nature by their appearance. I mounted both fake food made from clay and real food on the board, and turned out that people were unable to define which one was fake even when they had a closer view of the object.

Consciousness

People are sometimes tricked by their consciousness: our minds command behavioural and physiological responses based on the visual and sound cues in the environment, yet these responses might not be appropriate at that moment, because our consciousness is limited to only one perspective. Therefore, I used mirror paper to create the space, and folded the paper so people could not see their reflections clearly, illustrating the idea that people are not actually seeing what they think they are seeing.

Touch

Touch is the very basic form of communication; yet the prevalence of technology and social networking platforms have diminished people's engagement with face-to-face contacts. Fake fur was used to represent the foundation of communication, because animals used gestures, sounds, and touch to socialize. Humans are slowly evolving from the basic to a more technological and aloof mode of communication. Few holes were being made in the space to represent that sometimes people still crave for the warm, physical touch.

Sight

Eyes are our crucial channels to receive visual information and form perception. Most of the time, the truth is not necessarily the same as what we see. In this project I tried to create a visual illusion by recreating a waterfall that is upside down. Although people knew the waterfall was a counterfeit when they entered the space, their sight tricked them and made them feel that the pond was coming down at them.

Smell

People are often unaware of how they are being tricked by the smell in daily life. In this project I installed artificial flowers and real branches in a partially enclosed space. I wanted to trick the audience into believing that they smelled the scent of real flowers when they entered the space, without realizing that the floral scent was actually coming from air refresher, a synthetic replication.

Sound

Here, a musical tone was being played, and people had to distinguish whether it is ascending or descending. It turned out that everyone reported different results. This is a phenomenon is called Tritone Paradox: when a tone contains a higher and lower frequency, our brain has a preference for which to listen to. Research has found out that it is influenced by our geography and mother tongue.