Sense
Unfolding throughout 2024, Sense explored collective sense-making processes, aiming to encourage community cohesion and empowerment through extended cognition techniques.
The project involved innovative experiences both for the artists that participated, who collaborated with neuroscience, psychology and communication professionals and experimented with neurofeedback technology, as well as for the audience, who underwent a collective cognitive process together with the actresses in the immersive show created within Sense.
The show had 7 representations at Metropolis Theatre in Bucharest, benefiting around 800 people, while our communication actions within the project reached over 1 million people.
Creative team
Artistic Direction: Emilia Păunescu
Performers: Ioana Flora & Silvana Negruțiu
Music: Alexandrina Hristov
𝐓𝐞𝐱𝐭: Emilia Păunescu, Monica Cure, with the contribution of the actresses
Interactivity design: Ygreq Interactive
Light Design: Raul Păcurar
We often look at the idea of meaning as something fixed, something we have to find. We search for meaning as a truth, when in fact it is something in constant motion, something we create. Through relationships. Through connection.
Neuroscience reveals that our minds naturally think together with others and can be expanded by intentionally involving others in the processes of meaning-making.
In the frame of a fictional story, the show provides a context for the audience and artists to experience this captivating way in which we shape meaning together. Audience and actors negotiate how the story unfolds, leading to one of the different 6 endings the show can have.
Each representation ends with a collective dialogue, guided by a communication specialist, who helps the participants integrate the experience they shared.
The work integrates new perspectives from neuroscience, psychology and communication, especially around the concepts of extended cognition and predictive processing. The experience of the show is built through the interdisciplinary collaboration of the creative team with professionals in these fields.
Artists travelled to Luxembourg where they explored perception and sense-making with reputed neuroscientist Prof. Dr. Michel Mittelbronn, head of neuropathology at Laboratoire National de Santé and Centre for Systems Biomedicine, and the team at Emile Mayrisch hospital, collaborating also with Berlin-based collective FrauVonDa. Later in the process, the creative team was aided by artist and researcher Albert Barque Duran and specialists at Mind Architect.