Urich Lau
Life Circuit 5.0
It's not difficult to imagine a sense of electronic media over-stimulation from all of the cell phones, tablets, television screens, advertising billboards and electronic contemporary art that exist today. We are immersed in a world of images and sounds that saturate all our senses. It's also not hard to imagine how we experience a lot of this information from the outside, pumped to us from the external world. But, what is the effect of all of this on the inside of our heads, or even on our imaginations? Is that terrain also over-stimulated? Is that even possible? Or would that be what we regularly call the cognitive processes that go on inside of our heads?
Urich Lau's work explores the landscape of media saturation and turns the question inside out. His project mines the depths of mediated sensory deprivation in a performance of anti-stimulation. When he performs, Lau forces himself to be physically present in a media rich environment, yet deprives himself of the information that he projects into the room around him. Equipped with sound-proof and sight-proof headgear, the artist enters a black hole of sorts. And yet this same equipment generates a variety of streams of data that are broadcast about him. He is the sources of an electronic stream, that he himself does not perceive, creating a sensory force field that puts into play a mediated dynamic of excitation and lack. He over-stimulates the environment around him, while under stimulating his access to that same environment.
In this way the artist interrogates the future of human perception, not as a promotion of hyper-mediated experience, but as an engagement with our ability to perceive the world in many dimensions at once. Lau pushes our understanding of the perceptual dimensions that exist inside and outside of the human body further into the darkness and depths of our active imaginations.
