Floater Theater

Floater Theater is an intimate theatrical environment designed so that you are abler observe your eye floaters vividly and clearly. The Exploratorium in San Francisco describes itself as “a portal to the astonishing scientific phenomena that animate our world and shape our actions.” I grew up going there as a child and my many formative experiences there have influenced my approach to making art.

In line with my interest in other “boring” things like dust, on-hold music and time on airplanes, eye floaters seemed like a good case of a boring thing that transforms into something quite interesting once you know what they are and make a decision to spend some time actively observing them. Since you can’t show your floaters to someone else, I was also interested in the challenge of finding the right language to describe them (a situation with ties to the quandry at the heart of Please, Please, Pleased to Meet’cha).

The intimate “floater theater” booth had a red velvet curtain around it that you parted to enter. Once seated on the bench inside, the lights dimmed, and an orchestra could be heard turning up, like at the start of a performance at the symphony. I performed a voice over (equal parts faux-PBS “Masterpiece Theater” David Attenborough “Planet Earth”) that guided the viewer to look into a brightly-lit white field and relax their eyes so that the floaters could enter “the stage” and “perform.” While conducting research towards the project, I asked people to describe their own eye floaters; many of these descriptions (e.g., “Seahorses dancing around a maypole”) made their way into the voice over, as well as a brief explanation of eye floaters from an opthalmological point of view was.

Click here to see The Exploratorium’s page on Floater Theater.