Anti-Atlantis Music by LABOUR | 2022
immersive VR installation, various locations

Anti-Atlantis is an experimental multi-sensory installation at the nexus of immersive art and scientific inquiry that unites an interdisciplinary group of artists with Neomento, a leading virtual reality therapy and research group at Berlin’s Charite hospital.

If Atlantis is the story of an ancient culture destroyed by nature, then Anti-Atlantis represents its opposite – a future landscape destroyed by the human culture of excess. The organic form represents the vision of utopian paradise as we remember it – even though this memory might exist only as a constructed fantasy. The scene reveals the effect of “progress”; appropriation of nature as a resource for industrial production with alarming pollution levels. Anthropocene leads to paradise lost, a disaster scenario that, if we ignore warning signs, gradually consumes everything. Anti-Atlantis calls for the moment of awakening. In time travel between past and future, it brings attention to our present behavior, its consequences, and impulses for change.

Sensus Communis is the term taken from the philosophical idea of linked sense relations in human perception. This meaning relates to our theoretical concept, which deals with the themes of multi-sensory analogies, memory, imagination, and notion of reality, specifically aimed at the medium of virtual reality. We are exploring the interrelatedness of such aspects to prove the influence of multi-sensory immersive experiences on inducing conscious realization.