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.
The project taps into the exponentially growing areas of VR/AR/360 film, wearable technology/haptics, real-time data integration- contributing to all of these areas, while trying to address very real global issues. The resurgence of Virtual Reality (VR), the evolution of Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) and their use within performance work, which employs the latest mobile phone-based headsets, glasses, hardware and software, to make performance artwork and games occurs, which has demonstrated a 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.