Sensus Communis is a project that brings together Evelyn Benčičová (visual artist), Enes Güç (animator/3D designer), LABOUR (composers/sound designers), and Zeynep Schilling (graphic designer). The artists have previously collaborated on audio-visual shows, multimedia gallery exhibitions, and performances at Berlin Atonal, Sensorium Festival, Dark Mofo Tasmania, and the Czech National Theatre, among others. For this project, they worked with Joris Demnard of Ikonospace, a platform to apply 3D technology to the arts, alongside neomento, a virtual reality therapy and research group at Berlin’s Charité hospital. During their residency at Callie’s in fall 2020, the group worked on a multi-sensory VR installation titled Sensus Communis. The name borrows a Latin term that refers to a mythic sixth sense, which would have the power to unite all of the senses together.

By engaging virtual reality, spatialized sound, touch, and smell, the group is exploring the ways in which binary thinking can be transcended. The VR narrative will pose pertinent questions regarding unsustainable growth and accumulation, ecological destruction, ideological conflict, and digital surveillance. In the understanding that violence never sublimates, only consumes, the project proposes to radically expand empathy by using the VR platform to literally shift one’s perspective. Immersed in the non-physical world of VR via headsets and headphones, participants also encounter and interact with physical objects that will be set out before them. Each individual experience is further influenced by the collective experience of diffused synthetic scents and spatial sound over a six-channel speaker array. This ambitious project exemplifies the vast possibilities offered by multi-disciplinary collaboration, as well as the role of art and technology in addressing complex social issues.