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“The show ended, the lights came on, and the guests are lying on their backs, holding hands, shaking, sweating – tears, snot, drool – vibrating, unable to move for about 45 minutes,” says Sean Rogg. Surprisingly, Rogg isn’t describing the scenes of an internment camp or some other unspeakable horror. He’s talking about his latest art piece, Barzakh, an immersive experience like no other.
Staged within an old factory in Welwyn Garden City, a misleadingly idyllic town north of London, entrants will be grilled through a four-hour-long trial of reverence and rebirth. Their clothes exchanged for uniforms, the willing group will be subjected to blinding light, chilling darkness, biting sound, and, ultimately, a palpable sense of a higher power. This is not a pleasant trip to the gallery. “We use every phobia you can imagine: suffocation and isolation and degradation, just one after the other, slapping the outside world out of them; cleansing them, and then preparing them for the final moment,” says Rogg. Indeed, given its hellish toll, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to experience Barzakh at all. But Rogg insists that entrants experience far more than just distress; they achieve true empathy.
“I actually started to engineer empathy between them,” he says, remarking on a recent preview in Stockholm. “As a by-product of this connected moment, they were becoming passively bonded. Fleetingly. It only lasted about eight minutes. But it was working.”
This wasn’t the plan. Barzakh – the word is an Islamic eschatology term for purgatory – is actually the latest iteration of Rogg’s Waldorf Project, an ongoing art endeavour that began in 2012 as multisensory dining experience. But from these humble beginnings, the ambitious artist has expanded each new version to further immerse guests in his sensory worlds. It wasn’t until the project’s third chapter, Futuro, that these psychedelic experiences began to produce something more profound.
“At the end of chapter three, I was noticing this thing happening night after night: the guests would sit up and two or three people would spontaneously start crying and be consoled by the people around them,” recounts Rogg. “And there's no dialogue in this performance. For three or four hours they've not spoken word. But they've gone through this sort of collective Stockholm Syndrome and connected.”
And this newfound fellowship wasn’t just a surprise to Rogg, but to psychologists, too. Startled by Rogg’s results, and unable to replicate them in their own regulated workplace, some scientists are now turning to the artist for answers.
“The sort of things his subjects report: their spontaneous crying and so on, that seems like a fascinating experimental state, the sort of thing you'd normally only find in an extreme religious experience,” says Daniel Richardson, an experimental psychologist at University College London. Normally found investigating cognitive processes in his lab, Richardson has since partnered with Rogg in an effort to better understand just what the Waldorf Project is achieving. “We can't really get those [results] in the lab,” he explains. “I can't transport my lab to a mountain top or measure people who are actually on a pilgrimage. So this is a wonderful opportunity for us to come in and measure what happens as best we can.”
And given the rarity of the opportunity, Richardson isn’t leaving any data behind. Participants will be provided Fitbit-like monitors to record their heart rates, skin conductance, and body temperatures during the performance.
“We know that all of those things change in the laboratory when we manipulate things like arousal levels, cognitive load, and the empathy that you feel with people,” he explains. “If you're in a room with people you trust, your body temperature goes up a tiny little bit. So one idea is to put these sensors on people as they go through Sean's experience and see if we get an upturn in these physiological signals that are good markers of social connections.”
Richardson even plans to plant ‘spitting cups’ along the experience to gather guests’ testosterone, oxytocin, and other hormones. But his most revealing results might come post-purgatory, when the participants are invited to his lab to have their empathy clinically examined. “We can put people in an fMRI machine and scan their brains,” he says. “And the hope is that if we play the music [used throughout Barzakh, we’re going to evoke those feelings they experienced and measure their empathy.”
If Richardson can measure the entrants’ empathy long after Rogg’s project, he’ll prove the artist isn’t only affecting his subjects fleetingly, but enduringly. And there’s already evidence to believe that’s the case. While Rogg claims that participants resume normality after eight minutes, Richardson tells of Waldorf-goers with much more permanent experiences. He recounts what happened to one such person: “She was at a meeting once and someone in the middle of the meeting suddenly stopped and said, ‘Oh, it’s you’. And it turned out, by chance, that person had also done the experience,” Richardson says. “And she literally crawled over the table, sat down, and started hugging her. Because in that moment, she’d been reminded of this thing, and it just sort of washed over all over again.”
A profound shift in perception. An overwhelming experience. And an unspeakable bond between two people who witnessed it. In many ways, Rogg is achieving every artists’ dream. But he’s not satisfied. These tales of psychological metamorphoses stem from recent projects and may still be temporary. Rogg’s ultimate ambition is to guarantee permeance: a change in consciousness from which there is no going back.
“With chapter five, I'd like to do the overview effect, the way astronauts feel when they come back down, now permanently affected by the fact they've seen the Earth,” he explains. “So if this goes the way it's planned, and I'm armed with even more tools, and the scientific community are fully behind me, I believe that chapter five could create a permanent shift.”
It remains to be seen whether Barzakh, which opens on April 9 and concludes on May 12, can produce such everlasting effects. But life-changing for guests or not, Rogg’s synthetic salvation may just change psychologists’ understanding of unspoken empathy and the near-religious experiences that can induce it. Are such rapid rapports generated by fear, an uncanny sense of a higher power, or some primal relationship of the two? As the de facto deity of the whole social experiment, Rogg himself may be the best figure to ask.
“It's possible that I'm opening doors to senses that don't even have names yet,” he says. “To put that in the context of theatre, it just doesn't happen anywhere. If I can actually get a room full of people to suddenly feel like they're in the presence of god, or a god, and then do a Wizard of Oz and pull the curtain away and make them realise that it actually came out of them – that's going to be my final moment, where we connect everyone together.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
