Created for the 2019 Prague Quadrennial’s 36Q°, Blue Hour VR was a site-responsive mixed reality performative installation that placed the spectator, as experiencer, within a hybrid landscape of real- time three-dimensional computer graphics and 360-degree video. This article describes the design process, staging and experience of Blue Hour VR from the vantage point of its creators. Using a phenomenological perspective, the article discusses how Blue Hour VR staged presence and embodiment within an intermedial haptic experience. Blue Hour VR demonstrates how virtual reality technology can be harnessed by a mixed reality performance design, which includes both the material and virtual environment, creating a complex stratigraphy of intermedial textures and visual dramaturgies that co-exist inside, outside and in between perceptual realities. In doing so, the article aims to contribute to the limited body of work on mixed and virtual reality in the context of theatre and performance design.
In part one of this chapter, I commence by positioning my artistic PhD project in its field of practice (performance, scenography, fine arts), before describing and presenting the variety of methods that I deploy to research, develop and document the questions that I am concerned with. In part two, I zoom in on the case study, Thresholds of Touch, a performative experiment based on an inter-disciplinary collaboration between a composer/researcher, a sociologist and an artist/researcher (myself). I share how we set up a collaborative methodology between social science and artistic research, and what it contributed to researching touch from my perspective on practice-based research. The power relations between disciplines, methods and forms of expression/ knowledge will be traced and discussed. Finally, in the conclusion I reflect on the research outcomes and speculate on how different documentation strategies would have foregrounded other experiences, insights and/or knowledge.
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This books describes the content, goals and methods used in the course Research & Development/New Media Art Practices. ‘It opened up research terrains, and confronted me with art practices I had never even thought of’ said a university student when asked what she had gained from the course Research & Development/New Media Art Practices. In this master course, art students and university students collaborate on the formulation of research proposals containing artistic and scholarly components. Working together in the field of Art and New Media, on subjects such as wearables, mixed reality or mobile media, students become acquainted with each other’s practices, concepts and research methods. In this introduction, we will describe the content, goals and methods used in the course.
