Context /Conceptual background
Performance with immersive technology and VR performance has a powerful communicative power for
taking us beyond our own spheres of experience and to communicate through embodied visceral
movement. The audience members bodies are the focus of this research: exploring touch as a means of
translating and transfiguring experience, particularly rich data sets. Can immersive experiences allow us
to feel data in a performative way? Emerging performance technologies have the potential of transforming
intimate experience with data and initiating a visceral communication for and between people within a
group, which has previously been difficult to understand, digest and feel deeply. Artists like Rjoda Ikeda
have been demonstrating how effective these immersive data realities can be. Which begs the question:
How can immersive performance utilise data about the climate crisis within the performance space and in
online streams of communication? Performance that involves mutual space and big data gives us vital
new perspectives of our situation - and in the case of the info on the climate - this is information that it is
vital that the global community act upon.
The creative arts has a key role in rigorously questioning
and connecting the ethical dimension around our communication tools and how culture is using
connectivity: how do we take in and act on this moment of structural crisis? We are now at a critical time in human history where much research demonstrates that humans
are responsible for the dramatic and horrific climate events that we are witnessing around the world
through massive and regular devastating forest fires in North America, Europe and around the world this
year, to catastrophic earthquakes in Mexico, hurricanes in the Caribbean and the US, horrendous storms
and flooding in India and Asia. It is now evident that the world’s people and countries need to make more
drastic change in their behaviour and in themselves, as well as in our practices leading to environmental
damage in our world. At the same time, Michael Grubb, professor of international energy and climate
change at University College London, writes in Nature Geoscience that the world has a better chance
than previously claimed of meeting the goal set by the Paris Agreement on climate change of limiting
warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
As a resurgence of Virtual Reality (VR), the evolution of Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR)
and their use within performance work, employing the latest mobile phone-based headsets, glasses,
hardware and software, to make performance artwork and games occurs there is the need to encourage
a creative culture of communicative vigour. The new perspectives that VR/AR and 360 film and embodied communication has enabled has shifted the very nature of what we are able to communicate. Virtual communication may hold a key for experiencing ourselves as part of a co-creating network.