Multi-sensory Simulators - Text 6
In the Sensorama and the Introscaphe the viewer was invited not only to bring his or her head, eyes and ears close to the image, but to enter fully into an enclosed space separated from the world, a hermetic and even air-tight space. He or she was incorporated into the apparatus no longer virtually but rather literally. The movie theatre became a kind of vehicle, and the experience was like being transported. But the Sensorama and the Introscaphe were not suggestive of public transportation, the way the earliest film projections often were. Here the movie theatre was individualized; reduced to the scale of the viewer’s body and modelled on his or her body, it became a single-seater vehicle – at times a motorcycle or scooter, a race car or jet plane, and at other times a personal submarine or space capsule. The viewer became a kind of test pilot, and the aesthetic experience was comparable to immersion and navigation in a terrestrial, airborne or aquatic milieu, on an endless road or in unbounded space.
In addition, the two devices aimed for multi-sensory immersion. According to the Sensorama patent application, the goal was to produce “the illusion of reality,” “to stimulate the senses” and “the nervous system with a wide variety of sensori [sic] stimuli in forms that are natural to it, i.e. color, visual movement, complete peripheral vision, 3-D, binaural sound, breezes, odor and tactile sensations”; “to simulate an actual experience realistically.”[1]
Heilig and Alleyn belonged to very different social worlds. Heilig was a filmmaker and camera operator who wanted first and foremost to charm Hollywood. Alleyn was a young artist who wanted to carve out a place in the international contemporary art milieu. But the two met up in this one aesthetic program and this interest in individual simulators – and in coin-operated machines.
Neither of these two devices, however, got beyond the prototype stage. The Sensorama was presented in a few arcades and in several amusement parks, in particular at Universal Studios in Hollywood and at Santa Monica Pier, but it ended its active life under an arbour and a tarpaulin in Heilig’s garden in Los Angeles. The Introscaphe was going to be shown in the exhibition hall of the Grand Théâtre in Quebec City, but the exhibition was suspended after a few days because of a technical malfunction. The device ended up under a tarpaulin in Alleyn’s garage in Montreal. Each was mothballed like a mere out of order machine.
