Hybrid Sensorium explores the way we sense our body within the physical space and the sensory distortions caused both by mediating technology. The artwork is placed in immediate physical contact with the visitor, thus both become vulnerable to emotional contamination. A fabricated structure is superposed on the natural medium of the body, an artificial, permeable membrane that tries to condition our biological needs. The hybrid organism reacts in real time to the rhythm of your breathing and tries to adapt it to its needs, offering digital content in exchange for oxygen. It tests human availability to cede physicality to a constructed environment, while monitoring and archiving the user behaviour. By interrupting the breathing rhythm I wanted to trigger the perception of space as lived interval, suspended reality caused by a syncope in the objective reality. I developed Hybrid Sensorium around innerform concept – a space within, primary state, initial intention that imprints the entire history of a process. I treat form as inexistent in itself, as transient phase of a process, referring to space not as static, but as progression, dynamic content, lived space and time, originating in the interval, syncope, void. It can also be seen as a metaphor of the biological mechanisms of growth and decay inside of a seed, of the perpetually moving point within a process that is simultaneously the beginning and the end of it, scar tissue or material in a state of decay that triggers regeneration.

HOW IT WORKS. Insert your head completely into the orifice. Inside the capsule a membrane is breathing with you in real time, while he intimate sound of your breathing is amplified and propagated outside the installation, exposed publicly. The moment you hold your breath, the membrane opens and reveals a hermetically sealed head carrying a unique cavity where senses are mixed. The 3d animation plays only during your voluntary apnea. Your first exhale makes the membrane close again and return to the rhythm of your breathing.

THE BEHAVIOUR ARCHIVE. After being presented at Ars Electronica 2017 as a pilot project, I developed the interactivity system of the installation and created an application that continuously monitors and archives user behaviour, quantifying the user willingness to trade basic biological needs, such as breathing, in exchange for digital content. The data is available online during the time of the installation exhibition and also displayed on a screen next to the capsule where visitors can see both the behaviour of the user inside the capsule and the statistics history of user behaviour (peaks & average time holding breath, playtime with the membrane before holding breath, retrial number, etc). In time I want to create an archive showing statistics that monitors the human behaviour while interacting in various ways with a physical object with a digital core.

| responsive installation by Saint Machine, collaboration: Reniform aka Sergiu Negulici (animation), Mitoș Micleușanu (sound design), Răzvan Vasilache (interactivity programming), Radu Mititelu (electronics engineering), Sorin Olexiuc & Alexandru-Florin Vartic (behaviour archive&statistics programing)