Sensory deprivation

The immersive exhibition, PSAD Synthetic Desert III, was created in close collaboration with Wheeler himself to produce a hermetic environment. The gallery space has been designed to function as a semi-anechoic chamber – an environment designed to suppress almost all ambient sounds – so that visitors are deprived of almost all outside acoustic stimuli, and into this silence the curators will introduce specific sounds.

The environment has also been designed to minimise optical stimuli, with the floor space filled with a multitude of white pyramids. Visitors observe these structures from a viewing platform in the middle of the room, enabling them to become fully absorbed in the space and to experience something like the enormity and isolation of the deserts in northern Arizona that so captivated Wheeler.