I will confess, I’m a man with nerves of jelly.
When menacing music starts in a movie, I’m the first to slink low in a chair, hating the tense anticipation before the fright.
So it was with trepidation I stepped into the darkness of a shipping container on the Otago Museum Reserve yesterday to enter an unknown dimension.British transmedia artist Simon Wilkinson, of Brighton, created the performance based around the disappearance of eight pupils from Magic Valley Liberal Arts College in Idaho in 1959.
All that was found of them were eight letters, written by the students to their parents, detailing a journey to what they described as "the bright black edge to nowhere".
The letters were discovered inside a black wooden cube in the Great Basin Desert.
Inside the container in Dunedin yesterday, you are told two things before you put the virtual reality headgear on.
The first is to remain seated for the whole performance to avoid falling over or walking into a wall, Mr Wilkinson said.
"The second thing is that if at any point during the next 12 minutes you feel like you’re supposed to do something, and you’re not sure and you’re having a little conversation with yourself about whether you should do it or not — just do it and see what happens."
With the headset on you feel like anything can happen, you expect to be touched, and you give in to the urge to touch.
When the floor falls away from underneath you, you consider screaming for your mother but don’t because she wouldn’t hear you through the container walls.
When the performance is over, I tell the artist I’ve found his performance to be unnerving yet relaxing.
He says the description succinctly sums up his body of work.
"Sumptuous and warm yet there is something unnerving underneath it."
Go and see this performance but remember to tell your mother you love her before you step inside the dark abyss.
● The Cube is on at the Otago Museum Reserve from today until next Friday.
