Manipulated States of Consciousness: An Artistic Exploration of Perception, Sensation and Immersion

Manipulated States of Consciousness: An Artistic Exploration of Perception, Sensation and Immersion

Bonnie Mitchell’s electronic art installations explore the concept of perception and altered emotive states via interactivity, immersion and audio/visual stimuli. Over the past 20 years she has developed a wide range of electronic interactive installations that have altered the participant’s sense of reality, time and place. Her recent immersive installation entitled Shame on Us, invited the viewer into a room filled with scrim enclosed trees with projections of the results of both creation and destruction onto the multidimensional spatial elements. This holographic-like experience addressed the shifting politics in regards to the preservation of our natural resources. Encounters, an installation which invited the viewer to sit in a sensor-enhanced seat, provoked an etheral figure to emerge from a multi-dimensional stylized forest and ask thought-provoking questions. Internal Distance, used projections on walls along with figures trapped in hand-blown glass to create an environment that commented on internal conflicts. In Inhabitants, the viewer caught poetic animations falling from the ceiling onto hand-held projection screens to decipher the meaning of the piece. Experiential Extremism attempted to provoke the psychological states that entice people to gravitate toward thrill seeking, along with the emotional responses that occur before, during, and after extreme activities.