The Substanceless Space (2022)
Yan Hui: It’s a dropping away of my limbs and torso, a chasing off of my sensory acuity, dispersing my physical form and ousting my understanding until I am the same as the Transforming Openness. This is what I call just sitting and forgetting.
We are currently living through a global attention crisis. The average adult American office worker is only able to focus on a task for three minutes at a time, while the average college student switches tasks every sixty five seconds. Over the past few years, we have been increasingly transitioning our social, cultural, and workplace environments to a myriad of digital applications designed to collect data on our every move and fight for our attention, a phenomenon that has only been further exacerbated by a global pandemic.
The Substanceless Space encourages a moment of freedom from purposeful action. The neurologist Marcus Raichle discovered that patients strapped in for a PET scan waiting to be given a task showed high levels of brain activity a region he named the “default mode network” (DMN). It turns out that not thinking about doing anything is actually a way of exercising our brains, and a form of exercise we are getting increasingly less of in the modern age. I intended to design a space conducive for stimulating the DMN.
To the right is a sketch of the project concept, depicting a portable meditation room with a backllit projection.
The Substanceless Space is a portable room designed for sitting and dancing. The structure is built out of cedar wood frames, two shoji screen walls, and a projection screen. Screw grommets are installed into the corners to provide for ease of transportation and assembly. Inside the space, a speaker will play music while a projector mounted overhead will display visuals.
Buddhist and Daoist philosophies believe a thoughtless state to be an important method of connecting with the natural world and forces of the universe. The Substanceless Space suggests that free form dance is a meditative activity that allows the default mode network to take control of the physical body. Most of us have experienced a dissociative state induced by music; when we listen to a song that acoustically resonates with us, whether shared with others on a dance floor or alone in our bedrooms, we move subconsciously. This project will emphasize music with repetitive, lively rhythms with pleasant harmonic tones, which is the basis of danceability. An animation of colorful, pulsing pixels behind a meditating buddha contrasts the calm of meditation with the energy of disco.
In imitation of both the temple and the dance floor, audience members face the buddha but look within themselves. The Substanceless Space is an audio-visual experience that is situated in a physical space but takes place inside the mind; to the average viewer, it is an exercise in severing our connections to the physical world while reconnecting with our brain by demanding nothing of it.
The sound was designed with the influences of psychotherapeutic meditation tapes. Audio was scraped from the lectures of the philosopher Alan Watts and remixed into a musical soundtrack composed out of the stylistic elements of 80s disco. Audience members are mentally guided into a meditative mindset by the narration, while the music encourages reflexive body movement. With the combination of these elements, the sound is designed to modulate the DMN through physician activity.
In conjunction with the sound, there are also a set of accompanying visuals displayed on the projection screen, combining original animation, found photographs, and footage from the televised lectures of Alan Watts. Layered over each other, kaleidoscopic patterns of subconsciously-recognizable forms and colors emerge. The subliminal stimulus provided by the imagery desynchronizes the senses and prevents the brain from fully-processing any singular source of information. By continuously disrupting cognition, the attention networks of the brain are prevented from focused mental work.