The Institute for Voluntary Sensorial Deprivation, 2024
Curator: Udi Edelman

In her latest work, Chana Anushik Manhaimer explores the sensory experience within our contemporary socio-technological reality. We live in an era of an unprecedented flood of images – real, augmented, or fabricated – overwhelming us in their indiscriminate chaos. This sensory overload is driven primarily by multiple media screens operating simultaneously. Information and images of unidentifiable sources perpetually multiply through forwarding, copying, distorting, and layering. We scroll endlessly from image to image, switching between countless TV channels and streaming platforms, our gaze shifting from phone screens to computer monitors to televisions, trying to focus on one while others persist in the background. Often, these images are crafted to influence our worldview, interfere with our existing knowledge, and reorganize the meaning we attribute to reality. Visual manipulation is frequently intensified through the stimulation of additional senses, creating multisensory experiences, which are expected to expand in the near future into other forms and mechanisms. This sensory overload thrusts us into a profound crisis of trust between sensory input and consciousness, which strives to interpret, judge, and distinguish truth from falsehood. 

The challenge of relying on senses bombarded with technologically manufactured or manipulated images evokes unease and ambiguity, sometimes escalating to anxiety and dissociation. What was once confined to philosophical inquiry – Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Descartes’s meditation on sensory reliability, or The Matrix’s vision of a simulated world – has become our immediate and pervasive experience of uncertainty, detachment, and difficulty in discerning the truth of what lies before us. In this sense, questioning the reliability of the senses isn’t new. Yet, with the explosion of social networks, the refinement of consciousness engineering, and the growing integration of AI technologies, the scale and intensity of these challenges have multiplied exponentially. Against this backdrop, Manhaimer established The Institute for Voluntary Sensorial Deprivation.

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The Institute for Voluntary Sensorial Deprivation researches and develops strategies for defense and rehabilitation, aiming to restore our relationship with our senses while rebuilding trust in the body’s ability to filter sensory input. It offers a variety of methods to neutralize sensory stimuli, reset experience, focus on tactile engagement, and reflect on the very essence of sensory perception. Drawing inspiration from float tanks – facilities designed to neutralize sensory input for a predetermined therapeutic duration – and from scientific studies on anxiety and trauma treatments, Manhaimer has created an installation simulating a wellness center. This space invites the audience to physically interact with its facilities and engage in direct sensory experiences. 

The Institute for Voluntary Sensorial Deprivation examines how society organizes and dictates what is deemed possible to see, hear, and feel. The project questions the social structures prescribing who may see and be seen, hear and be heard, act and be acted upon. Through absurd instructions and sensory deprivation experiences, the institute allows participants to rediscover the power that lies at the limits of their consciousness. The different spaces provide environments intentionally designed for sensory restriction.  Yet, the audience is not constrained by these conditions – rather, they choose to actively engage with them, while the option to abstain remains a legitimate choice the whole time. 

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Through guided self-restriction, participants assume an active role in regulating their own senses. This way, the institute creates a localized space where the body emerges as a political arena, embodying the tension between personal freedom and the societal forces that shape experience. The project raises critical questions about freedom and the body as a vehicle for action and rebellion, seeking to restore participants’ control over how they perceive and engage with reality. Manhaimer defines the boundaries of the senses through their very use, aiming to cultivate a space that fosters a renewed encounter with the senses and reorganizes the inner balance between self and experience.

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The exhibition honors Chana Anushik Manhaimer as the recipient of the second Uri Katzenstein Interdisciplinary Art Prize.

Curator: Udi Edelman

The Center of Digital Art, Holon 

November 2024