"Locus Solus” is a performance based installation project which explores the idea of science in relation to accounts of contemporary and historical utopic imagination. Drawing on the novel Locus Solus (“Solitary or Unique Place” 1914) by Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), a proto-Surrealist text in which a scientist named Martial Canterel fits out luxurious laboratories in a villa near Paris. Each room demonstrates one of the ingenious inventions of his encyclopaedic mind. Locus Solus investigates potentialities of knowledge that emerge from the intersections of art and science. The evolving relationships and possible interfaces between science and art are explored. Artists invent interfaces between the abstract domain of science and art, while complex "science structures" are visualized. Cross-disciplinary interest in aesthetics is supported by visualization techniques and technologies. Those topics are investigated through diverse perspectives in a selection of artworks by artists from various disciplines. The project investigates how these artists choose to work with science in creating art forms. Artistic and scientific approaches share a deep fascination with aspects of "nature," "life" and "body." We see this in models adopted for exploration in technological environments. Focusing on artistic work with materials and concepts derived from scientific research, artists approach Locus Solus on several levels: By focusing on the use of the machine, by focusing on research laboratory as an art studio, by focusing on the concept of the experiment, by focusing on the human body and medicine, on artworks as new life forms, on the importance of "form" (concepts of symmetry, etc.) The intention is that audio-visual and automated digital media will enable experiential perception, particularly those which demand an interactive response and/or are concerned with the exchange between the lived experience as a result of technologies employed. Moreover, “Locus Solus” is a cross-cultural, location-driven, work-in-progress project, which aims to form a dialogue of practice based research with museums, universities, architects, visual and sound artists, dancers, choreographers, performers, set designers, video artists, researchers, scientists, writers and dramaturgs. The project concentrates on the attempts by one medium to integrate the technical procedures of another medium. Raymond Roussel's novel Locus Solus (1914) on account of its form and content, provides the canvas for such experimentation. Experimentation involves a preexisting cultural object and a complex performative context. The project highlights the exchange that can occur between diverse performance languages; verbal, corporeal, visual, aural and technological. The production appeals to the temporal sense of the viewer, while it deploys a model based on an analogy between Canterel's laboratories and a museum (cabinet of curiosities). The luxurious laboratories with the ingenious inventions represent the gallery where visual artists will exhibit their work. Canterel offers an insight into the work of visual artists. These art works have in common an approach to site that is actual and imaginary, a play between fact and fiction. Site may be an existing location, an activity, or a small found object. Acoustic and electric sounds audible in the installation, will be produced by the performers and viewers interacting with the architectural spaces (reflective cylindrical mirrors). Cameras will transmit these different spaces and activities. During the sound system/architecture interface, the viewers are exposed to different spaces of Locus Solus. By investigating the potentials generated through interactive technologies of digital and immersive media, the project aims to generate new understandings of and research into the impact and significance of perception in multiple sensory registers (auditory, visual, tactile), as well as the importance of non-verbal communication. The project will develop an approach to spatial use, through the application of augmented reality systems for spatial visualisation. Augmented reality overlays virtual objects over the real space. Parallel to this, Locus Solus integrates a contemporary approach to anamorphic art; artists will experiment with the use of the geometry of perspective. Roussel was preoccupied with the prefabrication of language, with the “readymade” and artifactual quality of words and his narrative was interrupted by parenthetical thought. His work has intrigued the Surrealists, Duchamp, Michel Foucault, John Ashbery, Cocteau and writers of the nouveau roman like Alain Robbe-Grillet who said that “the clarity and transparency of his works, exclude the existence of other worlds behind things and yet we discover that we can't get out of this world. Everything is at a standstill, everything is always happening all over again.” Roussel explored the boundaries and possibilities of language and representation in the form of “trompe-l'oeil” and of the labyrinth, while his works unleashed cascades of mirrors and strange machines. His text have seldom been presented in a theatrical context, however, he has been rediscovered and is now considered an ancestor of much experimental writing being done today in Europe. The Rousselian cosmos and the notion of “trompe l'oeil” and of “mise en abyme” represents a dynamic fusion, where artists can research on the relationship of the image, the object, the sound and the word. Moreover, the group has a core interest in the contrasting methods used in theatre practice and in curatorial practices in the visual arts, as well as the juncture where the two collide and possibly make a new field altogether. Therefore, research will focus on the relationships between 'matrixed' and 'open-matrixed' compositional methods. The production seeks to present issues involving private (solitary) and public space, hence it will deal with space, in terms of its physical transformation, through the movement of both the spectators and the performers. The procedural acoustic and visual installations, constructed by the architects, the visual artists and the scenographers will remain "in situ," and will only be transformed during the interaction with the performers for the actual performance. In this context, researchers from the School of Architecture, University of Patras, will investigate points of intersection (connections, linkages, overlaps) between the project and the public domain of the City. The dramaturgy will draw on the analogy between text, image and sound, in order to present an open work of literary allusions and echoes, narrative episodes and descriptive scenes, 'verbal found' objects, shifting aesthetic styles and registers. The production will be the locus for dynamic interactions between the body and material objects (including machines and technological devices) inside and outside, living and anti-organic, and for the problematization and blurring of these distinctions. Four performers and four dancers will embody eight figures within eight "Tableaux Vivants,” as John Ashbery described A prominent scientist and inventor, Martial Canterel, has invited a group of colleagues to visit the park of his country estate, Locus Solus. As the group tours the estate, Canterel shows them inventions of ever-increasing complexity and strangeness. Again, exposition is invariably followed by explanation, the cold hysteria of the former giving way to the innumerable ramifications of the latter. After an aerial pile driver which is constructing a mosaic of teeth and a huge glass diamond filled with water in which float a dancing girl, a hairless cat, and the preserved head of Danton, we come to the central and longest passage: a description of eight curious tableaux vivants taking place inside an enormous glass cage. We learn that the actors are actually dead people whom Canterel has revived with 'resurrectine,' a fluid of his invention which if injected into a fresh corpse causes it continually to act out the most important incident of its life. Locus Solus operates metaphorically as a representation of a private space transformed into a public act. These moving tableaux (as imagined by Roussel), their poetic facets and incarnations of flânerie (drifting) will be transposed beyond the empirical spaces of the city. The processual, as a form and these constructed textual, visual and aural environments, will be the framework for thinking about the relationships between “private-solitary” and “public” space.