AES+F. PSYCHOSIS

The images of the new work of AES+F «Psychosis» (MR or Mixed Reality installation) are based on the text of the cult British playwright Sarah Kane (1971-1999) «4:48 psychosis», written by her in a psychiatric clinic in early 1999, shortly before her suicide.

The viewer of the installation will be inside the surrealistic visions of the heroine of the work of Sarah Kane, will make a psychedelic journey that begins with a real hospital corridor and continues in the virtual space...

The MR project of the AES+F installation «Psychos» has a prehistory in the theatrical format. In June 2016, the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre premiered the play «Psychos» — a joint project of AES+F and director Alexander Zeldovich. The video (animation of 3D graphics), invented by AES+F, is parallel to the text, sometimes coinciding with it associatively, sometimes residing in a surreal mismatch. In their new work the authors were interested to return to such themes of the 90s of the 20th century as corporality, psychedelics and social protest, turning to the latest digital technologies of the 10s of the 21st century. The poetics of video content, sometimes fairy, sometimes horrible, are filled with images of a female body, blood, black snow, psychedelic flowers and cockroaches.

The music by Dmitry Kourliandski, which is used in the installation, same as in the theatre performance, is composed of nano-fragments of the «German Requiem» by Brahms.

Sarah Kane is the representative of the generation of style in-yer-face («right in the face»), which for her time pioneered new aesthetic truth and ways to escape from theatrical conventionality through shock and pushing the viewer out of the zone of confidence and comfort. The text of the play is organized as a chorus of voices, which are living inside the author’s head — a patient of a psychiatric clinic, where she fell due to depression. The early-morning time is presented in the original title of the play, a time when the heroine of Sarah Kane either kills herself, or at last, coincides with herself. A hunger for a love and intolerance to the own talent become a cause of self-destruction, which in reality has overtaken the playwright herself.

Production of the MR installation «Psychosis» was carried out with the support of NARRATEX.