Why you’re interested in immersive technology?

"Immersive technologies have mind-blowing capabilities to create new environments and perceptions, as well as engaging the senses and emotions of audiences. It is crucial to explore their potential to promote collective dialogues around representation, justice, political engagement, and social change."

Bio

Dr Lidoly Chávez Guerra is a lecturer and researcher with a background in public humanities, performance and media, and literary studies. She has a PhD from the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University (Canada) and a master’s degree in Translation Studies from El Colegio de Mexico. Her doctoral research on presence in indigenous theatre and performance was granted a Joseph Armand Bombardier scholarship from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. This work opened the path to further inquiry into the ethical and political implications of technological media and immersive technologies such as Extended Reality (XR) and 360° video at the Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience at the University of Glasgow. As a Researcher in Residence at the University of Nottingham’s Virtual and Immersive Production Studio, she explores the potential and limitations of immersive storytelling to reflect on, and transform, the relation between bodies and places, self and other, public and private, individual and collective.

The project

Technology for an Inclusive Public Sphere: Understanding the Transformative Power of Extended Reality (XR) Media Narratives 

Aligned to an interdisciplinary connection between socially engaged arts, media, education, citizenship and civil society, this research seeks to measure the relevance and effectiveness, but also the methodological flaws surrounding Extended Reality (XR) as a domain shared by science, arts, and media. Focusing on the work of creators such as Violeta Ayala and Michèle Stephenson, my main research question is: How does XR media address social issues and promote inclusion through a hybrid public sphere? 

As the developed world reaches for the future, the hybrid space between the physical and the digital that coexist in XR has become a key terrain not only to re-imagine a more just and inclusive global order, but to make it possible. Immersive technological media and the aesthetics of indigenous and afro-futurisms are demonstrating their persuasive and educational potential to exert pressure on sociocultural policies that have a real impact on communities. At the centre of this field of aesthetic and pragmatic action is a public sphere composed of hybrid spaces and bodies, which we access through cutting-edge technology. When we then take off the helmets and sensors from our real bodies, when we turn off the switches and monitors in our real spaces, the alternative virtual world needs to survive in our memory, individual aspirations and, eventually, in collective struggles to become a real alternative world. What resources and objectives guide the creators and technology futurists to transform the public sphere and communities? Who are these creators? More importantly, what resources do they have access to, where are those resources, and what power relations govern them? The search for these answers drives this research project, on order to understand the virtual utopia, as well as the real-world systemic issues which create a need for it in the first place. At the same time, unequal access to costly equipment and infrastructure used to produce such virtual utopia perpetuates the inequalities that creators and users are attempting to escape. Driven by these premises, this project seeks to explore viable solutions, cooperative practices, and cultural policies with which XR immersive storytelling can achieve a lasting impact in terms of justice, inclusion, and sustainability.

Find Nina online

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Why you’re interested in immersive technology?

"Immersive technologies have the potential to revolutionise how we tell and engage with different stories, but we also need to reflect on the sustainability stories we tell about these technologies themselves. We need to be critical and recognise both the opportunities and challenges immersive technologies offer when thinking about sustainability."

Bio

Dr Nina Willment is a cultural and economic geographer, interested in the intersections between digital technologies, audiences and climate action. She was previously a Research Associate with XR Stories, a £15 million Arts and Humanities Research Council Grant examining the social, cultural and economic impacts of immersive technologies. She is currently Researcher in Residence at the Virtual and Immersive Production Studio at the University of Nottingham. Her research fuses together critical reflections on sustainability and the climate crisis with creative making, using immersive technologies to examine the potentials of audiences to be affected to undertake collective climate action. She was awarded a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London, where her research examined the varied forms of creative labour and expression undertaken by online content creators.

About the project

Immersive sector stakeholders are often overlooked within public discourses on climate change, yet immersive experiences have the potential to significantly impact public understanding of how to address sustainability challenges, and the environmental and social impacts of climate change. Whilst immersive technologies offer huge potential for climate education, they can have their own significant carbon footprint and contribute to e-waste (Woodhead, 2023). This residency project will use immersive experiences (in their creation and content) as a lens to look critically at the sustainability challenges and potentials of the virtual and immersive production (VIP) industry. It will investigate the impact of immersive technology as a medium for telling sustainability and climate change related stories, exploring and evaluating audience interactions with virtual and immersive production hardware and storytelling, audience connections to other everyday digital devices and the sustainability challenges (and circular economy potentials) associated with immersive and digital technologies.

Project team

Jack Chamberlain

A Hull-based creative with over 10 years of experience working in theatre as a director, producer and performer. Explore Jack's website

Graham Oliver

Graham is a VFX artist and XR Developer with expertise in 2D compositing, 3D modelling, and Virtual Production. See Graham's LinkedIn profile

Dr Alexandra Dales

Alexandra is an economic geographer who works closely with public bodies interested in communicating about climate change and local to global sustainability challenges. Explore Alexandra's profile

Ben Carlin

Ben is an XR Consultant and Creative Technologist working in the intersection between theatre, film and gaming.

Find Marina online

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Why are you interested in immersive technology?

I believe that immersive technology can be a powerful way to engage with communities, with the aim of developing new and inclusive imaginaries, narratives, and spaces of representation.  

Bio

Marina Wainer is a Paris-based multidisciplinary artist. For the last 20 years, she has been making interactive art, at the crossroads of creation and technology. The artist explores societal issues and spaces of representation to create new perceptions and open up perspectives.  

Her approach is to imagine sensitive experiences where the public is placed at the heart of the work. The interaction proposed in her work, which encourages participation, has sometimes turned into collaboration, involving audiences from the very beginning stage (including working with different communities). MW has been developing transdisciplinary collaborations, with creators from other disciplines, researchers, and scientists. Her projects were shown in different cultural and academic contexts, in France and abroad. 

Alongside her artistic production, MW has devoted part of her activity to teaching and designing events related to her practice. 

About the project

The starting point for my reflexion on this project is the way in which representations of the world through artificial intelligence are being produced. AI is shaping our narratives and perceptions, with known and studied biases. The idea is to explore how to broaden the spectrum, how to give a voice to low participation communities in this construction, and set up inventive and innovative processes to create new stories and renew representations. 

The final outcome will be an immersive spatial experience, around urban and natural scapes representations created with AI by under-represented groups. This thematic ground proposes an interesting potential, firstly because representations of landscapes (urban, natural, real, fictional, dreamt, allegorical, …) have become large playgrounds for developing imaginaries with AIs. Also, because these spaces can speak to everyone wherever they live and therefore be easily appropriated by a wide audience as part of a participative and collaborative approach. 

With this work, I would like to think about new ways of dreaming up these imaginary worlds. 

The project

Conversations with Myself is a series of research events exploring digital twinning in immersive environments. The project builds on a catalogue of spoken work poetry inspired by Web3 ideology and communities, open knowledge, digital realms and digital fashion, and casts Jen and different iterations of her virtual twin as dual performers in an emerging narrative. Through experimental forms of image capture and the programming of a Jen LLM (language learning model / AI), Conversations with Myself will play with and bend the parameters of truth and authenticity in virtual and immersive environments, and ultimately blur the boundaries of artistic ownership through outputs created collaboratively between humans and machines.  

The project

“Growing up I would walk for hours around urban landscapes wondering what the hell was wrong with me. Queerness was always on the periphery of these spaces, something dangerous and outside the realm of “normal”. Walking in nature as an adult is healing because I’m surrounded by manifestations of sexual and gender queerness seamlessly integrated into the ecosystem, affirming the beauty of my identity. I view my queerness not as a problem, but as a creative offering from the natural world, a purposeful evolution that warrants exploration beyond society’s obsession with whether we have any right to exist.” - Maggie Bain 
 
In our project, Pùca - a liminal shapeshifting nature sprite from Celtic folklore, helps us bridge the gap between the natural world and that of the human world immersing the audience in the new ways of seeing that our technology is offering us. This 40-minute location-based experience leverages live motion capture and VR headsets for up to 12 participants at a time. Led by non-binary actor and motion capture expert Maggie Bain as Pùca, we guide the audience through five diverse environments, showcasing nature's evolution beyond sexual and gender binaries. 

To realise Pùca’s abilities we are creating avatars that hack facial rigs, allowing Pùca to 'shape-shift' emotionally and expressively. The audience will interact within each environment, from traversing the veins of a decomposing leaf to exploring micro-macro aspects of nature. By weaving storytelling with immersive technology, we aim to highlight the often-overlooked diversity and fluidity of the natural world and how it can help us understand ourselves and our place within it. This project serves as a personal exploration of queerness in nature, and also as an invitation to reawaken our connection to the mystical power of nature, through a captivating and transformative experience.

Why you’re interested in immersive technology:

Immersive technology allows you to fully encapsulate an audience’s attention and to not just tell them a story, but give them a story to fully inhabit, interact with, and experience in an entirely new way. Whether it’s VR/AR, immersive audio, alternate reality games, or capturing a performance in volumetric video, taking technological advancements and telling stories with them in ways that audiences have no choice but to engage in allows me to give audiences something fun to do while also allowing the messages from my stories to be felt rather than heard. 

What you will be doing in the studio:  

With the VIP Studio we’ll be developing a series of immersive experiences, one every few months until the end of 2025. We’ll be telling pertinent stories about the online world to audiences in the online world in ways that allow them to be in some modicum of control over the direction that their experience takes them. We’ll also be exploring ethical creative uses of AI to help empower artists, especially those who identify as disabled, Deaf, or neurodivergent, and making work through the lens of accessibility and sustainability as two key focuses.