// new media class


Livia Kirchner — What it would be like to be inside a beer

Micro/Macro (Course) — Summer 2020

fictional device and video

I thought about what I would do in my flat if I could shrink myself and I got most excited about all the food experiences. Jumping into jelly, bathing in lentils, exploring bread tunnels, entering a beer bottle to be in that green universe with ascending air bubbles. I always liked the sound of beer bottles. When you put the opening of the bottle against your ear you hear a similar deep spatial noise like when doing so with a shell against your ear, but additionaly the arising and bursting bubbles. Further the visual experience when you peek inside is interesting: light of pure green beeing reflected by the glass and liquid. Usually we experience beer mainly through our sense of taste. How can I address other senses and simulate the enveloping experience of beeing inside a beer? Beer pretty clearly is simply an alcoholic beverage and surely associated with many moods and memories, but never experienced visually or auditory. I developed a fictional device which enables a person to listen to and watch the air bubbles rise, accumulate, group and burst in the sphere of a green beer bottle. To visualize the experience one would have wearing this device I made a video. It starts with the device and actual beer bottle, but quickly takes the viewer away into a different world of abstract, but indeed real visuals and sounds occupying one‘s senses, letting one drift away from the actual surroundings, questioning the default perception of things.