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TUMULT

“Riotous storm systems, lightning bolts: the staccato light is an external representation of the visions she sees while deep in meditation.” – Fast Company
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TUMULT

“Tumult is a snapshot of the artist’s interior world at a singular moment in time, much like a photograph captures the external world.” – Fast Company

The technology operates as externalizing apparatus: what ordinarily remains interior and invisible (consciousness in meditation) is rendered as shared perceptual field. The audience encounters not representation of meditative state but its direct optical translation, positioning perception itself as medium rather than content.


Drawing from mid-20th century research demonstrating that flickering light affects cortical activity across visual and non-visual regions, the work investigates how stroboscopic stimulus reorganizes perceptual attention. The resulting environment operates at thresholds between vision and saturation, clarity and overwhelm—recalling apophatic approaches in which transcendence emerges through perceptual excess rather than refinement.


The performance establishes cybernetic condition: Chavez's consciousness modulates light, which in turn affects audience perception, creating distributed system where authorship circulates between body, code, and optical field. This positions consciousness not as subject matter but as operational medium—both generating and responding to the perceptual conditions it creates.
 

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Part of Mystical Vision, Chavez's decade-long neuroscientific research collaboration at Goldsmiths College and Queen Mary, University of London, Tumult extends laboratory findings into performance context, examining how technologies of neural measurement can function as aesthetic systems when consciousness itself is positioned as material.

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Details

Tumult, 2014-present

Immersive performance installation

Originally presented by House of the Nobleman in London, UK on the occasion of Frieze Week

Featuring an original stroboscopic biofeedback meditation technology co-invented by Lia Chavez and rehab

Photography credit: ioulex

 

Credits
Artistic Director and Performer: Lia Chavez
Presenter and Curator: House of the Nobleman
Code and Hardware Developer: rehab
Neuroscience Consultants: Dr. Joydeep Bhattacharya and Dr. Caroline Di Bernardi Luft
Curatorial Consultant: Tali Wertheimer
Producer: Two Rams

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Selected Press

Fast Company

BBC

Whitewall Magazine

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Tumult (2014)

An Immersive Performance Installation

Presented by House of the Nobleman

 

In Tumult, is a performance in which Chavez's real-time brainwave activity controls stroboscopic light, creating an environment in which her meditative state becomes directly perceptible as optical phenomenon. Custom software reads electroencephalographic data via Bluetooth, translating neural oscillations into corresponding light pulses—high-amplitude meditation producing rapid strobing, lighter states generating slower flicker.

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“Achingly frank metaphysical disclosure.” – Image Journal
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