The 5enses

PERFORMANCE PROSTHETIC, FALL'17

The manatee has a poor sense of vision, and relies on its sense of touch to navigate its environment. By using the whiskers throughout the surface of its body, the manatee ‘feels’ its environment from afar without physically contacting its surroundings. By detecting minute frequencies, the whiskers convey information of the current, water temperature, tidal force, and shapes and textures of objects. Upon the desire to sense more of its environment, the manatee widens the cavity within its jaw, and convex-es the surface area of its whiskers to analyze an expanded range. Yet by aiding its sense of touch, the manatee completely blinds itself, and must rely on flickering sensations to navigate through darkness. When circulating its environment, the manatee is unable to turn its head side to side, and must rotate its body to change orientation.

A Resonating Chamber of the Natural:

Island Dwelling

The abstracted concepts of the manatee translate to a passive chamber organ that resonates the exterior sensory experiences of wind, water, and light as internal music. Oriented on the spine of the island, the metal scaffold structure floating upon the surface of the landscape, penetrates through the spaces of inhabitation, to create a strict tempo of manmade structure. Approaching the system from sea level, one is funneled with the wind to the wind catchers that grasp the skin of the cliff. The rippling of the wind catchers echo through a central tunnel in a faltering melody that deviates through the rhythm of light and shadow seeping within. A channel leading from the pond, carries water through the tunnel, of which when rises, seeps through the slits of rock to drip and pour into the cistern cavity below.