Dr Harry Wilson: Placing Spaces
Lecturer in Digital Theatre and Performance-Making in the Theatre department at the University of Bristol and co-programme director of the MA Immersive Arts
Harry introduced and reflected on three projects at the intersection of immersive technologies and performance practice. The projects all share a series of concerns around the ways that performances made with immersive technologies can facilitate intimate encounters between physical and virtual spaces, imagination and affective memory, and draw attention to the user’s embodied participation in the work.
Harry discussed a VR performance for 8 people based on John Berger’s book and our faces, my heart, brief as photos, developed during a residency at the National Theatre of Scotland in 2019; Placing Spaces (2023) a geo-located augmented reality installation of his 7-year-old daughter’s favourite places in Dundee; and a forthcoming research project on the ‘expanded dramaturgies’ of virtual reality performance. You can watch the talk below;
Dr Francesco Bentivegna (Theatre UoB) and Katy Dadacz (Comp Lit PhD)- Queering AI
This talk launches the Queering AI project, an exploration of artistic responses to the marginalisation of trans and queer folx in speculations surrounding the future of AI. Through six months of workshops and talks, they hope to shift boundaries and destabilise AI through the trans* and queer experience of the world.
The talk will first introduce the context from which the project has arisen. AI obscures multiplicity, yet errors are produced in the process- how then can queer theory and practice think with AI? They mapped out some key contemporary artistic interventions on AI and reflect on the processes and speculations that appear from these practices.
In the second half of the talk, they shared past collaborations with Bristol-based artists, researchers, and PM Studio residents. These collaborations have focused on sharing queer methodologies for creative technologies in workshop settings, asking how can we create a community-based practices centered around queer values when working with technology?
You can watch the talk below;
Dr Camilla Morelli (Anthropology, UoB): Ethnographic Animation
This talk explored Dr. Camilla Morelli’s work on ethnographic animation, i.e. films that blend people’s lived experiences with fictional storytelling and imaginative scenarios. Camilla has coproduced these animations with children and young people around the world, from urban Bristol to the Amazon rainforest, to explore how they imagine the future amidst radical challenges they face in the present, and to amplify young voices that remain unheard.
Camilla Morelli is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at The University of Bristol. She has been conducting ethnographic research with forest-dwelling children and young people for over 15 years, exploring how their imagination and desires for the futures drive large-scale processes of socioeconomic change and shape the future of their societies and natural environments. Her book, Children of the Rainforest, is published by Rutgers University Press and was awarded the ACYIG – American Anthropological Association 2024 Book Prize.
You can watch the talk below;