This space is for you was initiated in 2022 as a research-creation platform and experimental site to build a community of artist-researchers working with site-specific performance-based research methods for designing with 3D visualization technologies; to understand what creating with 3D capture technologies offer performance practices, and what Queer-feminist methods and perspectives bring to performance design and the crafting of extended reality scenographics.
The overarching goal of this ongoing research-creation work is to undertake a performative inquiry and enact an ecology of Queer-feminist approaches to designing with technologies of capture. Queer-feminist engagements with 3D technologies is guided by critical concepts put forward by Queer and feminist-technoscience discourse, including Sara Ahmed’s notion of Queer disorientation (2006) and Possible Bodies who inspire designing with deviation, and “turning towards a queer ethics of clumsiness for volumetrics.” (Volumetric Regimes, Pritchard 2022, 163)
The first iteration of this space is for you, experienced with a Varjo XR3 HMD, was developed in 2022-2023 and presented as a mixed reality environment – an experimental prototype for the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design & Space (June 2023) – focusing on themes of refugia, and a loss of that place. For Donna Haraway the term refugia describes renewal and the spatial hideaways “from which diverse species assemblages (with or without people) can be reconstituted after major events.” (2015: 159) Haraway, in her reading of her colleague Anna Tsing, argues that a loss of refugia, the wiping out of regenerative and diversifying hideaways, characterizes our modern geological epoch; where the generative relations that are the basis of diversity have no place to re-world themselves in our current Chthulucene (Haraway 2015). Refugia is an engagement with re-worlding, and the desire to re-find respite after a major event. this space is for you was imagined and crafted as such a place, and its loss.
The next iteration of this space is for you (2.0) will be guided by theme of Xenia, or radical gestures of hospitality. As a concept from which to build the project, radical gestures of hospitality also underscored the political work of collectivity and deviating from the sociocultural norms that predominantly drive the pervasiveness of ‘world building’ with immersive and hyper-interactive environments. Designing with 3D visualization technologies require performative, Queer and feminist inquiries to problematize the ubiquity and culturally normative orthodoxies of creative technologies used for immersive consumer experiences.
A main goal of the research-creation phase to come is to establish a performative method and dramaturgy for collaboratively performing with technologies of capture and with the instability, latency and glitches of 3D capture technologies. Research-creation activities will be guided by Mary Overlie’s Six Viewpoints – a method and practice for deconstructing experiences of space, shape, time, emotion, movement, and story. Viewpoints will be explored to understand the tensions of embodying and performing with different material realities staged in XR environments.
- Conceived by, Direction & Dramaturgy: Shauna Janssen
- Creative team & research associates:
- Digital scenography: Kévin Pinvidic
- Unity and Depth Kit consultant: Olivia McGilChrist
- Depth Kit consultant: Ricardo Morejon
- Choreography: Leslie Baker
- Soundscape: Shauna Janssen
- Technical advisor (ZùMTL): Véronique