Curated by Jessica Tully

Saturday, November 20, 2010, 12:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Sunday, November 21, 2010, 12:00 pm - 6:00 pm

FREE

*Sign up for a 15-minute massage session by calling (415) 863-2141. Space is limited.

Recursion Projection Therapy (RPT) fuses integrative therapeutic massage, immersive video art and shared perspective virtual reality to create a technologically mediated healing modality capable of inducing collective out-of-body experience. Transformative healing is possible.

By integrating healing and visual arts, practitioner Jason Stephens creates, controls, and projects visual information, in the form of dynamic mandalas, directly onto the client during the healing session. With a camera and projector mounted above the massage table, the client becomes the projection screen. The camera captures the entire scene below and sends live imagery to the helmet-mounted video displays worn by both client and practitioner, thus allowing the client and practitioner to experience themselves, and each other, from a shared out-of-body perspective. The client is shown a live image of their own body, blanketed with live video and receiving bodywork from the practitioner. The practitioner is shown the same live image, administering therapeutic massage to the client while controlling the video projected onto the client’s body. The shared experience created by this arrangement amplifies the transformative potential of the healing session by inducing a collective out-of-body experience.

In addition to signing up to receive body work, gallery visitors are welcome to observe the RPT sessions in progress as well as view a direct live feed of what the practitioner and the recipient see through their Head Mounted Displays (HMD).