TOUCHING THE NERVE | WORK IN PROGRESS |

is an interactive performance. I give a Shiatsu massage. Sensors read movement and touch. Data is transformed into image and sound creating an involving experience.

Last year, after learning Shiatsu with a Japanese Master in a school in Lisbon, I worked as a Shiatsu Masseuse keeping an empty room just for that purpose and going to some clients houses. Mapping the body, creating relationships of trust, releasing accumulated pains, healing and meditating was part of my daily work. Most of the persons were doing Shiatsu massage once a week, so I had time to feel the reaction and evolution of the body and how emotions were impressed on it. Sometimes people cried. Sometimes they laughed. Sometimes they needed to talk and I was there to listen to them. Sometimes they told me the images that came to their minds during the massage, personal, intimate images…

Based on this experience, TOUCHING THE NERVE is an interactive performance. During the performance I give a massage. The massage techniques are multiple, some are just pressure, some produce sound - like percussions, they have different movements, different rhythms and different sound natures depending on the place of the body where the massage is being applied and the different positions of my hands. 

Some sensors read movement and touch (the touch between my hands and the skin/body). Some others read the physiological data of the person being massaged (as the breath, temperature, brain activity). The information is transmitted into images and sound. The images are projected into a screen placed in a place where the person being massaged can be able to see. The sound involves the room.

The video images created for this performance are based on the expressed images that come out of the mind while a person is having the massage. The images are prepared before, but they interact with the data in the moment of the performance. The research and shooting of those images have to be prepared between the performer and myself.

In TOUCH THE NERVE, the touch and physical/physiological reactions are also translated into sound using a MIDI sensor that connects directly to a synthesizer/sequencer where the new data/sounds interact with a musical database previously constructed.