Auditory Maze / Matan Zohar

Auditory Maze from Ars Electronica 2013

Digital technologies have extensively changed our perceptions of space, mostly due to the integration of virtual spaces in our everyday lives. Yet in actual spaces our spatial perception relies mainly on our rich visual system. We see rooms, hallways and obstacles and use them as visual signals in order to understand how the space around us is constructed and to derive the feeling it projects. Sometimes we also rely on our tactile experience, our hands on the walls of a dark corridor or a pain in our toe when it hits the corner of a room. All of these make us update our virtual mental maps.

Auditory Maze explores whether an empty space can generate this mental map of walls, corridors and corners not by the interpretation of visual inputs, but by auditory feedbacks that acoustically describe the borders and limitations of the surrounding space. By doing so, automated behavioral patterns and modes of perception are disrupted and reformulated.