Immersive Embodiment: Postdigital Performances of Care
On the 16th May, the CCT invited Liam Jarvis to give a keynote lecture.
In postdigital culture, virtual body-swapping using different technologies staged by artists, has been conceived as an illusion to ‘increase empathy’ by enabling audiences to visually and proprioceptively occupy the position of an other. Eccentric perceptual illusions of othering the self is just one example of a pervasive trend towards empathy activism in the medical humanities, arts, education and healthcare contexts; from smartphone apps that offer their downloaders first-person simulations of neuroatypical experiences to ‘out-of-bodiment’ wearables that enable new visual perspectives beyond human binocular stereoscopy in the field of art-engineering. Temporary transformations of the participant in the immersive artwork are occurring in parallel to an ever-growing understanding of the plasticity of bodily selfhood in the field of neuroscientific body-ownership. This talk will explore the seductive promise that an ‘immersed’ body might be porous to a range of remote experiences and phenomena; examining the possibilities and emerging digital ethics of embodying avatars in different contexts.
Liam Jarvis is a practitioner-researcher and Reader in Theatre & Performance at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. He currently teaches on the MA/MFA in Advanced Theatre Practice and is supporting the development of the new Centre of Performance, Technology and Equity (PTEQ) at RCSSD. Previously, Liam was Director of the Centre for Theatre Research (CTR) and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies (LiFTS) at the University of Essex. He co-founded Analogue, an award-winning independent theatre company with whom he created devised work that toured the UK/internationally between 2007-17. Liam was co-convenor of the Intermediality in Theatre & Performance Research Working Group at the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) from 2017-21. He is currently on the Editorial Boards of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media and the Body Space and Technology Journal.
Publications include Immersive Embodiment: Theatres of Mislocalized Sensation (2019), Theatre Rites: Animating Puppets, Objects and Sites (2021) by Liam Jarvis and Sue Buckmaster (2021), and Avatars, Activism and Postdigital Performance: Precarious Intermedial Identities (2022); the latter is a collection of essays arising from the research of the IFTR Intermediality in Theatre & Performance Research Working Group, co-edited with Karen Savage. Most recently, he co-authored Postdigital Performances of Care: Technology & Pandemic (2024) with Karen Savage; the inaugural book in the new Methuen Drama Performance and Digital Cultures series on which he is co-editor.
