In An Intentional Blind Date performance the designers of Daevas, Asia Samimi and Nima Fardi, invite visitors to begin their journey toward a new understanding of communication with another person. During the exposition visitors mostly use their sense of touch, a sense that requires trust and intimacy. The experience starts when the visitor trusts (confides) the performer by giving their hands through two holes without seeing the performer. This unusual experience is the ultimate goal of this performance, where the focus will be on trust, connection, and creating a dialogue without ones sight.
Our daily interactions are based on massive complex information that we receive through our senses; they create a part of our actions and reactions. Sight is the most dominant sense among them. Ironically, what we see is not the universal truth! It’s a subjective reality. Visual sense has a unique and personal virtual reality, masterfully constructed by our brain.
To create the experience of sight, our brain references our conceptual understanding of the world, other knowledges, memories, emotions, mental attention, and our biases and link them to our sight.
Luckily, sight is not the only the way we shape our reality. We create the reality in many other ways via different input channels. Our senses are plug and play devices to collect information. It is, then, the brain’s decision on what to do with those data that are in. For brain it doesn’t matter where the data comes from, what matters is how it has to process it. That’s where the expressions of “eyeless vision” and “finger vision” comes from. That means people can sense (see) through other senses as well. Undoubtedly, there is a big difference between looking through- or browsing- data and actually experience it. By limiting the sight, this performance stimulates other senses to create a new understanding of the Umwelt.
Artistic Objectives Of An Intentional Blind Date, Here We Show Nothing
- Highlighting the importance of creating a relation, a tactile dialogue with a stranger; without prejudice and conditions of the society biases;
- The performance, being the same for all recipients, doesn’t consider the differences in age, gender, religion, and etc;
- Stimulate the sense of touch and highlight its importance;
- Nourish the creativity in adults and make them feel like a child again.