SENSORIUM TESTS
Daria Martin

Within a scientific facility, subjective perceptions take center stage. Sensorium Tests, a 20 minute, 16mm film, will be set in a controlled laboratory environment where a woman is being measured for her capacity to automatically respond to sensory stimuli while a scientific observer, hidden behind a one way mirror, observes. This woman's sensory responses to selected tones and images mimic the real-life neurological phenomenon of synaesthesia, the inextricable joining of normally separate perceptions ('hearing' colors, 'smelling' words, 'tasting' shapes, 'feeling' names). In particular, our protagonist is being tested for mirror-touch synaesthesia, in which visually observed touch is felt viscerally on her own body.

As the experiment progresses, the synaesthete begins to imagine the (male?) presence behind the one-way mirror, fantasizing an empathetic connection, imaginatively bridging the alienating strangeness of the situation. When the film concludes, the two roles are switched, and the scenario starts all over again, flipping a gendered or essentialist reading, and implying another kind of mirroring.