Phosphene is a film for closed eyes and spatial sound. It employs projection on the audience’s eyelids, a multichannel sound setup, and motorised directional loudspeakers.

Inspired by dreams, neurosciences, and hypnosis, the project aims to explore a variety of inner spaces. It is an attempt to reach those territories we might tend to forget or deny, between the surface of the senses and our interpretation of reality, in the depths of imagination, illusions, and doubts.

The experience invites viewers to co-create a subjective film shaped by the signals from the setup and their personal interpretation. The composition triggers sensorial phenomena (psycho-physic) and activates the mechanics of our perceptual system, which attempts to decipher a coherent reality. In a bidirectional dialogue of projection and injection, viewers filter, transform, and overlay the incoming signals with their own intimate material — memories, imagination. The performance invites us to collectively dive into those inner meanders and reconsider our reality-making processes.

Phosphene has been developed at the ArtScience Interfaculty (The Hague, NL), awarded the Digital Arts, Sound Art & New Writings residency at Château Éphémère (FR), and received the Technology & Society Award by Waag Future Lab (Amsterdam, NL) The project has been presented in various contexts and fields such as expanded cinema (Venice Art Biennale, IT; OFNI Poitiers, FR), experimental music (Vortex Geneva, CH), digital arts (36 degrés Paris, FR; Le Cube Garges, FR) and art-science (Waag Amsterdam, NL). It has been showcased in relation to themes such as immersion, the human psyche, and alternative modes of vision (non-anthropocentric, untutored eyes, impaired sight). It was developed alongside research on dreams, human perception, and the political implications of our meaning- making processes.