Playing with virtual realities: Navigating immersion within diverse environments (artist-led perspective)

Abstract

Dealing with the intermedial performative practice of dancing with VR technology, in this account I frame the creative media of VR technology and bodily performance as epistemological media, in which we can be immersed but also develop reflective awareness to the processes of leading visions and movements. The account follows the interdisciplinary and intermedial practice-based research experiment 'Playing with Virtual Realties' (gamelab.berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin). The project brought together two dancers, a philosopher/choreographer, two theatre scholars/dramaturges, two computer scientists/gamers, and two media experience designers to co-explore how the embodied practice of dancing can interact with HTC Vive, a virtual reality headset developed by HTC and Valve Corporation. At the outset, the experience of moving within VR technology interrupts the perceptual processes in dance, and throws embodied thinkers into a dualist - Cartesian - state of mind, in which visions, actions, and thoughts are disconnected from the sensual body. This account reports how we faced the challenges of navigating immersive experience between diverse environments, and our methods for developing a movement practice in mixed realities. I demonstrate how, by using cross over methods from media experience design and choreography, we composed a physical performance in which the dancers learned to assimilate awareness to the actual space, to their dancing partner, and to the audience, while negotiating their immersive experience within the virtual environment.