The Experiential Art Spa experiment (EASe)

EASe is a space where technology enhances your ability to be present. It is a mixture of new media interventions, social vulnerability, and time-tested strategies for physical relaxation. Upon arriving, You are welcomed into a bathhouse environment both familiar and strange, where your biological and psychological processes move in synchrony. The sun moves at different speed here, night comes before dusk, and the water is always flowing, the plants are always growing. Time is revealed as the act of perception itself. 

As an ongoing process-oriented ritual experiment, EASe appears as both events and installations across New York City and beyond.

Some of our recurring small group rituals:

Day & Night - A ritual of compressed time.

Enter a sauna that is heightened by sound and light design that passes through the spectrum of dawn and dusk every 15 minutes. “How many days have you been here?” participants ask each other, and the night falls, the steam rises, dawn comes, the bells toll, and the birds sing.

Say When - A ritual of drawing boundaries, for yourself, with each other.

How much is enough? How do you know? If you don’t say so, who will? These questions play out before, during and after a collective sauna experience in a scripted interaction where participants must answer these questions for themselves.

Soundscapes - A ritual of listening to yourself and others, to sound and silence.

Each participant chooses a tuning fork from the chromatic scale, and plays rhythms that describe their internal state: how do I feel right now? Clusters of notes emerge as the instruments sound, amplified through the wooden walls, reflecting our collective feeling. When things get too hot, participants set their instruments down. Once all stop playing, water is poured, & we drink in the silence.