Response: Electric, One on One Festival at BAC

Professor Ray Lee has the air of a GP carrying out some form of check up. He peers over his rectangular glasses and looks directly, deeply into your eyes. He reacts to responses with noncommittal hums or, more disconcertingly, a slight tilt of the head that suggests intrigued, even wrongfooted, puzzlement. Most of all his questions and his requests spring come from nowhere: “OK, hmm. Have you ever had an electric shock? Hold this, please.”

If the relationship feels familiar – and that’s not to say entirely comfortable – it’s also slightly warped. After all, Ray Lee is tucked away round the back of the building. The stairway to his squalid office, which feels more like an academic’s lair, is lined with peeling paint. There’s a sense of disreputability, as if perhaps his “ethometric research” has not been entirely condoned. Your eardrums vibrate with a constant hollow metallic buzz. Certainly, the room is charged, quite literally, due to various machines that clutter the shelves, murmuring, droning and whirring.

Electric fits into that category of art which opens your eyes to something commonplace taken for granted. Asked to define electricity and describe its workings, I’m pretty stumped. Something about the flow of electrons returns from a shady memory of a strip-light in a Physics classroom being used as an analogy. There’s a sensation of a first (and last) shock – in both senses – aged no more than four.

And then, you’re connected. Ray Lee touches your hand, completing a circuit, and a tingle paces over your fingers. It defies description, but remains absolutely recognisable as the sensation of electricity. I was reminded of the taste of a battery on the tongue, not a flavour but a feeling. Rather magically, there’s also a realisation that something – electrons, presumably – is travelling between your body and his. There’s a genuine exchange. Its smile inducing and eye-widening.

Yet Lee also allows you a sensation of danger. Placing both electrodes – oddly cold – in your hands, he invites you to increase the force of the charge by tightening your grip. It’s an unnerving, unsettling and thrilling effect. Was I projecting that my heart tensed? Certainly a vein in my wrist flickered into spasm. Curiouser and curiouser, indeed.

There’s little more to the experience than that, but it takes a while to shake off. Walking away with a tingle still caught on your skin and a bemused smile, it’s the sort of experience that feels like a small privilege. An opportunity given. Another of life’s little experiences ticked off the list.