Artist Marcos Lutyens’s Colour Therapy is a synaesthetic data project launched in six cities worldwide — Amsterdam, London, Milan, New York, Singapore and Toronto — and on show between now and December 31, 2014.
As an offshoot of the Colour Therapy project Marcos Lutyens invites you to participate in a performance in London’s Piccadilly Circus on the evening/night of September 12, 2014 (approx 6pm – 3am). This will involve up to 40 participants in an orchestrated gathering whose electronically choreographed umbrellas respond to the ‘emotion-colour’ of passers-by and ties into the video installation on the large scale screen.
The performance relates to how emotions are transmitted unconsciously from one person to another through empathy. Empathy is a hotly investigated branch of Neuroscience that stems from the discovery of mirror neurons by Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma, Italy. The renowned neuroscientist, V.S. Ramachandran, with whom Lutyens has experimented with synaesthesia, believes that mirror neurons form the basis of self-awareness. Ramachandran has also investigated how the senses cross over in the mind, and how colour is tied to emotions and consciousness. Earlier this year Lutyens participated in Mirror-touch: Synaesthesia and the social with a hypnotic induction designed to open up pathways between the senses in the mind.
We hope that you may like to join us in this emotion-mirroring performance. The movement required by each umbrella holder will be quite simple, along the lines of a kind of cellular automata, in which each person follows on from the movement of the person next to her/him.
To participate or for further information, please contact Bakul Patki
