Phosphene is a film for closed eyes and spatial sound. It uses a 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 varieties 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 us to co-create a subjective film made by the setup's signals and their understanding by the viewers. The composition triggers sensorial phenomenon (psycho-physic) and activates the mechanics of our perceptive system which tries to decipher a coherent reality. In a bidirectional dialogue of projection and injection, viewers filter, transform, and apply their inner intimate materials (memories, imagination) to the signals that reach them. 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), laureate of 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 showed in various contexts and fields such as expanded cinema (Venice Art Biennale, OFNI Poitiers), experimental music (Vortex Geneva, Inkonst Malmö), digital arts (36 degrés Paris; Le Cube Garges) and Art Science (Waag Amsterdam). It has been presented in relation to topics of immersion, the human psyche, and alternative modes of vision (non-anthropocentric, untutored eyes, impaired). It has been created in parallel with research on dreams, human perception, and the political implications of our meaning-making processes.