Balloon Rooms

While scrolling through my favorite visual arts blog (which I highly recommend), I was intrigued by one particular eccentric project. Penique Productions, an artist collective based in Barcelona, came out with a series of photographs of transformative installations they had created in public places. These installations consisted of enormous plastic balloons inflated inside grand spaces within buildings or other interior areas. Below is an example of one such installation, but this link will take you to the entire series.

When I saw the brief introduction to the series which explained that these artists had chosen to When I first saw these photographs, I did a double take. The results of their efforts were like nothing I had ever laid eyes upon before. So many aspects of the rooms had disappeared, hidden behind the rubbery sheets of the balloon. There were no longer colors, except for the one solid color of the balloon, there were no people, the lighting was completely thrown off, and there was no sense of depth. However, with these things lost, other aspects of the room that would have otherwise gone unnoticed suddenly jumped to the foreground. For example, the outlines of the pillars and intricate edges of the architecture became sharp and eye-catching as they pushed on the flexible fabric. And by washing out the colors of the walls and warping the lighting through the large windows, my perception of the size and shape of the room changed dramatically, just as my house somehow seemed much smaller or larger after we moved all our furniture out before we moved.

This results of this project immediately reminded me of the neurological phenomenon that occurs when people lacking individual senses, like sight or hearing, try to gain insight from the same things as fully sighted or hearing people. Often, it is observed that those lacking certain senses have compensated with hyper-acute other senses, and perceive things using different parts of their brains than those with all their senses fully functioning. For example, as this source describes, blind people often use their advanced sense of hearing to detect the locations of objects, therefore highlighting aspects of those objects that sighted people would tend to take for granted.

Areas of brain activated by Braille tactile discrimination task indicate activity in occipital lobe (includes primary visual cortex) of early blind person, but not of sighted person

It is wonderfully curious that this seemingly simple and done-for-the-hell-of-it design project can serve as a simulation of the mental processes of the blind and deaf. The perception exercise that simply scanning these photographs evoked is one that is very valuable for all people to experience. Not only does it give us a deeper understanding of the world view of a significant population, but it also gives us a deeper appreciation for the simple things around us. Who knew a balloon in a room could do so much?