Displace 1.0 is a performative environment presented at the annual American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting, held in Montreal, Canada in 2011.The piece intermingles multiple sensory phenomena in order to heighten and transform our habitual modes of perception. Over a 45 minute period, groups of six visitors progress through a sequence of environments. At first, these environments intermingle gustatory and haptic stimuli and gradually convoke all the senses inside intense, almost hallucinatory spaces where flickering color, sound, tactile vibrations, and fleeting tastes and scents merge to a point of saturation.

The project is one of series of experiments conducted within the context of a larger research project entitled “Mediations of Sensation” developed by artists Chris Salter and TeZ and anthropologist David Howes along with a team of researchers in design and anthropology. The aim of “Mediations” is to create a space between art and anthropology where contemporary art practice can be informed by advanced research in sensory anthropology, and vice versa. Sensory anthropology is dedicated to charting the varieties of sensory experience across cultures. Howes and his team have documented a wide array of ways in which the senses are distinguished, ranked, mixed and deployed and enjoyed in different cultures. Displace 1.0 mirrors this anthropological experience by offering an embodied, technologically augmented series of environments designed to open a crack in the conventional Western sensorium and transport the visitor into a parallel sensory world.

The installation ran as a public prototype from Wednesday, 16 November through Sunday, 20 November 2011 at the Hexagram Concordia Centre for Research-Creation in Media Arts and Technology inside the Hexagram Black Box research space from 15h-20h daily.