“The eye is the lamp of the body.
If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light.
But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.
If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”
Matthew 6:22-23
Building on the idea of sound healing and iridology, this sonic pharmacy aims to transfer the patterns of people’s irises into another sensory perception which invite the participants to a meditative level and hence bring the therapeutic effects to them through an abstraction in both visual and auditory manner. It is a data sonification and visualisation piece as a further development for Sarah’s previous project “COSMOS”(2018).
The biometric data analysis is seen as an interesting research field. There have been quite a number of studies and experiments on biological data sonification although it is still a rather young discipline. The Sonic Pharmacy invites the participants to enter a meditative journey after their iris has been captured. A digital ophthalmologist (the artist and the computer) is going to give an eye test and then a sonic prescription to the patient (every participant). The unique patterns and structures of their irises will be transferred into another meaningful sensory perception through abstraction in both auditory displays and visual space Sarah created. Considering both iridology and sound healing as the alternative therapy, she created a new sonification system by using the integrated therapeutic intervals and link them with the 7 zones of iris and she named these notes “Sonic Vitamins” since everyone has different vitamin requirements and these special vitamins are sonic nutrients your body needs in small amounts to work properly and stay healthy. In this case, through the interaction with this performance-based media artwork, the audience can be both the “patient” and “healer”.
BEHIND THE SCENES