Sensis * 2017
gnration, Semibreve - Festival de Artes Digitais (Braga, Portugal)

Sensis is a media art installation co-created by António Baía Reis, Roberto Vaz, Suse Ribeiro, and Tiago Dionísio, conceived as a sensory work per se: an intimate, walkable “black box” where sound, shadow, and memory are triggered by the visitor’s movement. Presented at Semibreve – Festival de Artes Digitais (Braga, Portugal, 2017), the installation treats the body as both audience and instrument, composing an immersive environment in real time as each person traces their own path through the space.

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Rooted in Portuguese collective memory - Poetry and Fado as emotional technologies - Sensis begins from the poem “Quem dorme à noite comigo” by Reinaldo Ferreira, sung by Amália Rodrigues (1966) and later reimagined through a piano composition by Júlio Resende (2013). Rather than quoting the poem intact, the work deconstructs it into fragments, breaths, unintelligible murmurs, pauses, and “deafening silences,” inviting each visitor to rebuild meaning from their own archive of fear, longing, solitude, and desire.

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Visually, the installation conjures ghost presences, blurred silhouettes, spectral shadows, residues of bodies that seem to have passed through before, so that the space feels haunted not by characters, but by shared affect. Technically and poetically aligned, Sensis uses body tracking and spatial interaction to activate an evolving dramaturgy of light and sound (including approaches such as binaural/ambisonic spatialisation), making memory tangible as an embodied event: a choreography of perception where the visitor’s movement becomes the editor.