, the challenge was to make a bridge for each audience member to feel invited to participate in the music. We wanted them to feel uncertainty about what was happening and about their own position within the spectacle and, beyond that, the wider world. In this way, I was less interested in making a set than in interrogating and deconstructing the nature of spectacle itself. I was interested in including drummers in the audience and the 'survivor' as part of us on our side of the safety curtain. The safety curtain is like an eyelid that might blink and divide us from and then connect us with this emerging world.

My own challenge was to find some form of visual equivalent to Hofesh Shechter’s sound-world that might be partially dance, partially a body in space, partially film, that does not illustrate but provides a depth dimension. I wanted every single viewer to be able to negotiate their own journey through this sea of sound, image and emotion. We tried to keep it open, to keep the sense of uncertainty about what is going to happen next, what image or atmosphere will crash, fade and interrupt the next. The most exciting thing was keeping a sense of anything being possible – using time as the most precious material.

Hofesh Shechter & Antony Gormley, commissioned by the Barbican, London, produced by Hofesh Shechter Company. Photograph by Tom Medwell

, 2012, Hofesh Shechter & Antony Gormley, commissioned by the Barbican, London, produced by Hofesh Shechter Company. Photograph by Tom Medwel

, 2012, Hofesh Shechter & Antony Gormley, commissioned by the Barbican, London, produced by Hofesh Shechter Company. Photograph by Tom Medwell