CIM401.2
Research Question:
How can the integration of 12-part frameworks - the Hero’s Journey, the Circle of Fifths, and the RGB Colour Wheel - enhance audience emotional engagement and perception of interconnectedness in an immersive audiovisual art installation?
Are you the Hero or the Villain?
This project is a stimulating, immersive art installation that explores the merging of interconnected frameworks - the Hero’s Journey, the Circle of Fifths and the RGB Colour Wheel - in an audiovisual sensory environment as part of a gallery of similar works in a ticketed venue in Byron Bay. Set within a 3m x 6m mirrored room filled with non-toxic smoke, the piece beckons the audience into a complex space designed to evoke emotional resonance and reflection, where narrative, music and lights converge in a symphony of cyclical patterns.
The full-length mirrored walls create an infinite space, where the senses are fooled and the boundaries between the physical and the abstract are blurred. The smoke softens the visual field and encourages a dream-like state of perception, wherein the 12-part structures of each framework unfold, creating a shared rhythm across story, sound and light.
The audience travels from the ordinary world to the special world, literally - by entering the installation; and figuratively - by embarking on a shared narrative journey. Within this space, they are invited to become participants rather than mere observers, their emotions and senses intertwined. The installation becomes a liminal zone where personal and collective experiences converge, offering each visitor a unique opportunity for introspection, transformation, and a heightened awareness of interconnected patterns that mirror both human experiences and universal structures.
‘World-building comes out of thinking of the space of a story as a fictional geography.’ (Jenkins, H., 2010). This installation explores the concept that geography transcends physicality: the literal space is transformed into an interconnected system where narrative, music and light converge in an infinite, mirrored environment. The artwork becomes a symbolic landscape that audiences inhabit and navigate. By entering, they step into a multi-sensory world designed to blur the boundaries between the tangible and the abstract. Through layers of implied meaning and sensory engagement, the installation becomes a living narrative of interconnected ideas, where the audience’s emotional resonance and reflective journey unfold as intrinsic parts of the fictional world.
Inspired by the historical and mythical universality of these cyclical systems, the work seeks to reveal the harmony and the chaos that emerge from their alignment. The Hero’s Journey reflects humanity’s collective aspirations and struggles, the Circle of Fifths embodies the mathematical beauty of music, and the RGB Color Wheel provides the visual guidance to these patterns, combining the emotional affect of sound and story to the spectrum of light.
By integrating these systems through a program of transitions in aural frequencies, chromatic light shifts and spatial design, the installation invites the audience to experience a heightened awareness of interconnectedness and transformation. The interplay of mirrors and smoke asks viewers to reflect not only on external stimulation but on their own internal dialogue, fostering a moment of introspection within a broader perspective of life.
The piece, being a loop of 3 minutes and 53 seconds, allows for an interesting and unique range of experiences for the viewer to be had, deeply influenced by the moment of arrival within its temporal cycle. Drawing on the concept of world-building as a ‘fictional geography’ (Jenkins, H., 2010), the entry point of the audience in time dictates a statistically different spatial and resonant interaction with the landscape and narrative of this special world. For instance, arriving at stage 6, ‘the battle with the enemy’, immerses viewers in a chaotic, visceral atmosphere of flashing red lights, distorted, heavy metal-inspired discordant music and overwhelming tension. In striking contrast, arriving at stage 1 situates them in the familiar rhythms of the ‘ordinary world’, marked by gentler, green-pastured lighting, lush chords and a sense of calm before the forthcoming adventure. This variance in sensory and emotional impact transforms the installation into an evolving anecdotal topography, where each visitor’s journey becomes a deeply personal interplay of timing, warped perception, and self-reflection.
Deleuze’s idea of repetition and difference (Deleuze, G., 2006) offers a compelling lens through which the installation can be understood. Rather than mere duplication, repetition in the Deleuzian sense involves iteration with variation, where each recurrence introduces a subtle or profound shift that evokes new meaning. The looped structure of the artwork exemplifies this concept. While the framework of the Hero’s Journey, the Circle of Fifths, and the RGB Colour Wheel remains constant, the audience’s sensory and emotional experiences are shaped by their specific entry point into the cycle. The repetition within the installation - both visually and aurally - creates a sense of continuity, but difference emerges through the unique interactions of light, sound, smoke, mirrors and narrative at each stage. Arriving at any of the 12 stages will plunge the audience into any number of emotional states - from subdued and reflective, to chaotic and uncomfortable, and anywhere in between. These differences are not merely incidental but are integral to the work, allowing the audience to perceive the cyclical pattern as something alive and dynamic, rather than static. Each loop may seem to return to the "same" structure, yet the shifting sensory inputs, the audience's timing, and their subjective interpretations ensure that no two journeys are identical. In essence, the installation becomes a living embodiment of Deleuze’s philosophy - where the cyclical patterns of narrative, music, and light continuously generate new meanings through their iterative differences.
The title of the artwork, “Are you the Hero or the Villain?”, aligns closely with Deleuze’s exploration of how repetition contains the seeds of difference. In Deleuze’s view, repetition is not simply the recurrence of the same but a generative process, where each iteration introduces subtle transformations that challenge fixed notions of identity and meaning. The audience is immersed in a repetitively structured world, yet their experience of it depends entirely on the stage they enter and how they engage with the audiovisual environment. These statistically differing shifts in perception suggest that neither role - hero or villain - is fixed. Instead, the cyclical nature of the installation invites viewers to see these identities as fluid, coexisting, and contingent on their unique position within the loop.
The repetition of not just sensory patterns - light, colour and sound - but also the audience’s physical presence in the infinitely illusory nature of a mirrored room, serves as a framework through which differences emerge, pressing the audience to confront the instability of moral binaries. Are they truly the hero? The villain? Or do they occupy a space in between, shaped by the interplay of repetition and difference in their experiential journey through the installation?
‘In immersive art spaces, mirrors contribute to the creation of environments that evoke emotional and physiological responses. A study conducted at Kyoto University demonstrated that an immersive art space utilizing mirror displays significantly impacted viewers' heart rates and emotional states, indicating a clear sense of immersion in the art pieces. This suggests that mirrors can enhance the immersive quality of art installations, making the experience more engaging and less reliant on traditional devices.’ (Kazawa, G., 2024)
At its core, this work is an invitation to self-reflect on the immersiveness of the symphony of cycles, where story, sound and colour resonate to remind us of the beauty of interconnectedness and the patterns that shape our existence.
The concept of augmented reality as a form of interactive narrative is particularly pertinent. It combines computer-generated elements with real-world contexts, creating a unique blend of fiction and reality. This blending can be analyzed through the lens of narratology, where the transgression of boundaries between reality and fiction enhances the immersive experience. Such narratives can benefit from established conventions of storytelling to emphasize these blurred lines, thus enriching the audience's engagement with the narrative . (Shilkrot, R. et al, 2014)
Although Shilkrot’s medium is AR, his concept of blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction resonates with my use of smoke and mirrors to instill the feeling of the audience having crossed a threshold from an “ordinary world” to a “special world”, as the Hero’s Journey describes. This hybrid reality works with sensory elements to enhance an audience-centric perspective that encourages reflective dialogue within the participants, greatly resonating with the title of the piece. This multi-sensory method of story-telling deepens the interconnectivity of the 12-step cyclical systems and the audience’s connection to the artwork, where different perspectives of heroism and villany can be experienced all while navigating the emotional arc of the Hero’s Journey and metaphorically mirroring the human experience of life.
What ideas and concepts were raised by the explorations in my CIM401 portfolio?
Throughout the trimester, some important concepts were explored and developed during my portfolio creation. The interconnectedness of cyclical metaphors in a multi-sensory environment, where the audience’s experience is shifted depending on when they entered the installation. The emotional resonance of the lights and soundscape as it arcs around the 3m 53s loop. The narrative ambiguity and audience perception within a smokily distorted and infinitely reflective, illusory world, where the audience is trying to figure out if they are a Hero or a Villain; which reinforces the instability of binaries and theories of cohesion vs fragmentation. The final project pitch and future installation benefitted from the use of technologies in ways that they were not originally designed, and combining these technologies in creative ways.
Mary Kelly’s work (1999) inspired concepts of resilience and adaptability - where discomfort in art can be a catalyst for critical thinking and growth. She pushes the emotions of the audience into depths they weren’t expecting, which gave me motivation to truly try to disorient my audience at the ‘fight with the demon’ stage of my installation. I began to think about how I might blind the audience with strobes and even discussed this matter with Chris Dekker, the Artistic Director of my proposed venue, Otherworld, which he loved the idea of.
Concepts of Dadaism (Jones, D., 2014), contributed to my exploration of the instability of binaries and tied together the rejection of identity of the hero and the villain being fixed. The reflective walls and disorienting smoke reinforce the echoes of Dadaism’s resistance to traditional interpretations of art, and instill in the audience an inner conflict about the fluidity of the roles of heroes and villains within narrative works.
The cyclical nature of this work, and the fact that it can be entered at any time, which greatly affects the audience’s perception of the installation, had me thinking about multiplicity in art (Deleuze, G., 1987). The sensory convergence of story, sound and sight embraces the rhizomatic model of non-linear systems, inviting the participants to be introspective about their place within cycles that blur traditional distinctions. The concept of ‘becoming’ described by Deleuze and Guattari argues that identity is continuously transforming and fluid, which this artwork perfectly illustrates in many, layered ways.
Moving Forward
After completing this installation in the near future, I will have access to more spaces at Otherworld for more audiovisual/ interactive/ sensory art installations. I would like to try looking further into incorporating more cycles-of-12 into the ones I’ve already worked on. Some of these include the months of the year, the hours of the day/ clockface, dodecahedron, the Zodiac, the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 steps to recovery. I have thought about expanding the 3m53s loop I have now into a bigger piece like an album, with 12 songs that explore each stage of the systems in more detail and breadth, some kind of synesthetic-inspired experience: a multi-sensory performance by a band or DJ act, something along the lines of what Toby Wren did with his ‘Songs for Dead Sailors’ (2025), or David Page’s life-experience-inspired composition for ‘Music and Sound-tracks of our everyday lives’ (2019).
