The use of virtual reality (VR) technologies has seen a significant resurgence in both industry-led and artistic communities in recent times. This re-emergence can be linked to the continuing growth and advancement in smart phone technologies (e.g. developments in accelerometers and gyrospic chips), as well as a significant interest within the games industry for developing a greater quality gaming experience. Such technological advances along with a renewed interest in creating richer immersive experiences for gamers have not only helped to drive down cost, it has also increased the range of toolkits now available to the wider artistic community. As a consequence, there has been a significant rise in the use of VR technologies specifically within the performing and visual arts.
VR technologies have a long and established history. As Oliver Grau recognised in his seminal text Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (2003),
the idea of installing an observer in a hermetically closed-off image space of illusion did not make its first appearance with the technical invention of computerised virtual realities. On the contrary, VR forms part of the core of the relationship of humans to images. (4–5)
As this Special Issue highlights, the use of VR technologies has been re-energised as a technology of choice for those wishing to find fresh definitions for human interaction and connection. Significantly, our capacity to connect, to form emotional and meaningful relationships with other human beings, to expand our knowledge of each other within an advancing technologically rich world, provides scaffold for all of the works presented. The issue includes six articles from a variety of disciplines, ranging from artistic propositions, experiential testimonies, and conceptual and methodological investigations. The issue closes with two artist documents, which act as performative illustrations of the types of explorations currently being undertaken in the field. All of the authors, in some way or other, address the intrinsic nature and transformational possibilities of working with VR in practice. Specifically, we wanted to highlight the perspectives of the makers, the doers, the inventors, and the architects of this revival. Over and above the exciting and significant developments being made within the technology itself, this issue hopes to forefront the practicalities and implications for those creating and experiencing VR by, and through, the making of performance-based works. Importantly, some of the intrinsic characteristics specific to the medium of VR are further explored through a range of disciplines, which offer fresh perspectives to the field.
The issue opens with Miriam Ross’ discussion of her autobiographical short 360-degree film titled PND. In her discussion, the author draws our attention to the low-fi qualities of VR technologies in order to create a haptic visuality framework. Given the industry-led focus on greater visual fidelity and a greater quality of experience, Ross provides an alternative perspective that helps to highlight some of the fundamental questions that sit at the heart of VR practice – how to form emotional and embodied connections. By exploiting the glitches present in the technology itself the author challenges this advancing production of high fidelity images in favour of a more visceral and grainy experience. Using her autobiographical experiences of PND (Perinatal Depression), Ross’ poignant account highlights an alternative vision for the use of VR technologies. Usefully, the author also provides a link to her film, which the reader can observe in tandem with reading the text. Ross’ account advocates touch and synesthetic correspondence by developing an embodied relationship between performer and viewer. She does this by harnessing the incongruities that exist in the fabric of the technology, such as highlighting digital noise and by allowing her viewer to see the ‘unstitched edges’ of the environment.
This is followed by Amanda Fromell’s vivid account of AΦE’s VR-performance Whist. Using her role as dramaturg, the author explores the affects of this particular VR performance in terms of the conscious and unconscious mind. By focusing on the gaze of the participant, Fromell argues that VR’s unique mechanism provides the basis for a new type of interactivity. The author’s articulate descriptions provide a useful insight into the company’s process. Through her analysis, she describes the complex mapping of narratives, which brings to light some interesting challenges for the company. Fromell’s writing offers three distinctive dramaturgical devices that will be of interest to those concerned with the alternative spatial, embodied, and interactive possibilities offered by VR.
Lisa May Thomas and David Glowacki’s timely article follows on from Ross and Fromell. As with the previous two articles, Thomas and Glowacki highlight the potential for creating visceral and embodied encounters derived through VR technologies. However, this article extends these ideas further by offering a deeper reading into what we might perceive and comprehend through our experiences as both seen and felt. Using somatic dance training and improvisatory techniques as a scaffold the authors make a sensitive case for understanding what they characterise as the ‘perceptual gaps’ within virtual environments (VEs). Using a robust critical framework Thomas and Glowacki set out a methodological approach, which draws upon a series of workshops titled the Bodily Undoing. Using these workshops as a case study for creating affective and embodied experiences, this essay acknowledges the important knowledge dance has to offer to the field. In so doing, Thomas and Glowacki promote the importance of ‘VR’s potential to awaken new modes of perception’ significantly through a somatic and embodied appreciation of technology.
Shifting in theme, Panayiota Antonia Demetriou examines some important debates surrounding ethics and the challenges of post-digital immersion – both as a term and as an experience. At the heart of the article is the contention that those commercially driven imperatives, derived from a knowledge-based economy, can tend to overlook a long history of imaginative immersion that comes from more traditional media. Through Demetriou’s discussion of the integration between art and engineering, she uses a methodology of Imagineering to challenge the consumerist standpoint. The author maintains that a principal understanding for XR-enabling technologies (i.e. the combination of physical and VEs) can be found in Don Ihde’s 2002 post-phenomenological analysis of early VR in Bodies in Technology where performance, co-creation, narrative, technology, embodiment, agency, and environment are understood as intertwined. In consequence, the author not only acknowledges the complex nature of our embodied relationships with technology, she also suggests that the isolation of the VR headset can constrain the users’ ability to feel real immersion. This article provides a theoretical discourse, which offers new approaches to mixed reality performance and concepts of immersion, specifically through body-centric and ethically driven experimentation.
James Charlton and Magnos Moar take our Special Issue into the realms of theatre and drama. In this article the authors document their practice-as-research approach to the transference of a work titled Fellow Creature into 360° video, or as they describe ‘VR panorama drama’. The article usefully details many of the practicalities involved with such a process and offers those working in a similar area useful strategies for considering how best to transfer dramatic material into 360° video. The authors explore how the theatrical experience translates from one medium to another, and highlights some of the artistic and practical challenges inherent in such a process.
Sophy Smith’s important article brings together some of the themes of this Special Issue. In her discussion of six key VR dance works, she outlines some key characteristics including types of creative content, the impact of collaborative partnerships, and the different roles played by an audience. Smith’s article helpfully catalogues a range of dance companies including the Sydney Dance Company, Dutch National Ballet, English National Ballet, Baldwin and Unseld, Boleslavský and Júdová, and AΦE. The works discussed provide a useful collection of the different ways in which VR is being utilised specifically in dance practice, which can be further applied to a range of creative practices. Moreover, Smith’s Tool for understanding VR dance work helps to draw together some of the key features of current artistic and technological developments, and offers an important tool for categorising audience reactions and participation.
In our penultimate piece, Joseph Dunne takes us on an energetic journey through the work and artistic processes of ZU-UK’s interactive VR performance Good Night, Sleep Tight. It takes the form of a performance script, which combines the voices of the project’s artists and technologists with those who experienced the work. The artistic format provides the reader with a valuable insight into the Company’s creative methods and how this manifests itself in performance. The reader is taken seamlessly from descriptions of the work, including text from the actual performance, through to audience testimonials as well as hearing directly from the artist’s themselves who describe the projects core intentions. This provides the reader with a stimulating example of how artists and technologists go about the creative process.
We close with Johannes Birringer’s provocative and vivid descriptions of DAP-Lab’s real-time immersive dance installations. The author’s striking descriptions of what it might be like to move, to dance even, through their VR worlds, brings to life the impact of working in VR environments. Birringer’s provocation challenges some of the long-held assumptions regarding immersivity, and highlights some of the slippery distinctions between the real and the virtual. The author’s final thought, ‘how a space enters us, and how we enter an elemental material perception-space’, provides a useful catalyst for continuing to think about how we engage with these rich, complex, and ubiquitous technological domains.
As all of the contributions in this Special Issue emphasise, the continued progression of technologies remains a fundamental conundrum for all of us engaged in artistic practice; not least, as we continue to better understand the complex nature of human interaction within our highly technologised-world. We therefore offer this issue as a springboard for further exploration by acknowledging the important work artists and technologists are undertaking, and importantly, by highlighting the diverse ways in which creative practitioners are helping to mould and advance the use of VR-technologies in current contemporary society.