#1777: Active Imagination, Associative Dream Logic, & Embodied Interactions in “Sense of Nowhere”

I interviewed Hsin-hsuan Yeh about Sense of Nowhere on Tuesday, September 2, 2025 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy.

Here is the story synopsis for Sense of Nowhere:

"Where do we go when we zone out, and how do we find our way back to reality? Sense of Nowhere is a journey from no-where to now-here, inspired by The Way from Taoism, the Illusion from Buddhism, and Jung’s practice of Active Imagination. Blurring the line between inner world and outer reality, it transforms sonic, fragmented thoughts into a tangible experience. It is an invitation for the audience to explore the subconscious, piece together hidden clues, and find their way returning to the present moment."

Here are the contextual domains that are explored:

[9] - Dreams and unconscious [9], and the philosohpically-rich surreallity [9], and active imagination [9] as well as invocations of various associative links and memories [1]. Focuses a lot on these embodied interations [1] and dream-like absurd surreality [9] as a primary catalyst to pervert our expectations.

Here is the Elemental Center of Gravity:

1st Center of Gravity of Air Element / Mental and Social Presence: Jungian Active Imagination, Associative Dream Logic, Chaos, Plausibility, Philosophically driven. I gained a lot of context from this interview about the meaning of the patterns, as well as how it is structured from exploring the Particles, Materials, Subconsciousness, Reality, Illusion. So it's the type of piece that can be fairly sparse and abstract, but worth unpacking the emerging spatial grammar and symbolic semotic explorations. There's also a bit of absurdist and surreal tone to this piece that is aspiring to transcend your expectations to enter into a unique possibilty space of exploration.2nd Center of Gravity of Fire Element / Active Presence: Lots of embodied and interactive loops throughout this experience. These interactions were very much designed to take the audience into an introspective journey. Director was initially resistant to talk about the piece at all as her preference would be for people to have their own immersive and interactive experience of it, but I managed to navigate the conversation using my own experiences as a proxy to dig more deeply into the design intentions.3rd Center of Gravity of Water Element / Emotional Presence: Music. Lots of iterative loops that are designed to be exploratory processes, which are then juxtaposed to each other throughout the piece creating a bit of interactive montage feel, but not a lot of explicit narrative threads to hang upon.4th Center of Gravity of Earth Element / Environmental and Embodied Presence: Lots of experimental embodied actions integrated into this story, but also very surreal and liminal imagary.

Archetypal Themes and Character Explored:

Very much a non-Boolean and non-dual approach with an embodied and associative link explorations.

Artist Statement:

"Sense of Nowhere begins with a drifting, zoning out, as the world fades into a blur of sound and sensation. Where does the mind wander when it slips from the present? Through sonic textures and visual cues, the work guides a slow return to awareness, driving thoughts from the edges of the subconscious. Ideas flicker in and out, like palms slowly opening and closing, present, then gone. There is no fixed narrative, only fragments that invite personal interpretation. Each viewer notices certain things, remember different feelings. In this difference lies the quiet beauty of thought itself: the way we make sense of the world mirrors how we come to understand ourselves."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDajMkKRjXo

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Music: Fatality