Give and Take
VR and video installation created by Sarah Hermanutz in collaboration with Desiree Förster, Andreas Rau, and Michaela Büsse. Give and Take present a multi-media installation that uses an immersive and responsive environment to create sensitivity for metabolic processes and vegetal life.
With regards to climate change the urgency to acknowledge our complicity with the ecological crisis seem inevitable. However, due to perceptual limitations this endeavour seems impossible. Designed in an abstract and evocative manner, the first part of the installation invites the viewer to experience the CO2 cycle reduced to the interaction between the human breather and the plant’s photosynthesis. In a second part, we zoom out from this isolated experience into its chaotic entanglements and display how localised behaviour of molecules leads to specific connections, events and disappearances.
The experience that leads the observer from micro to macro scales of vital processes, extends the sensible experience towards metabolic relations with the surroundings. The immersive environment induces a perceptional link with thermal, climatic, meteorological processes that are enacted in partial response to the engaging individual.