VR Dancing Postcards: imagining new ways to move through the city

VR Dancing Postcards: imagining new ways to move through the city

The ‘Affective Relations’ panel is made up of researchers from the Theatre Dept. and the Centre for Creative Technologies at the University of Bristol. Collectively they will interrogate the claims of immersive technology as an ‘empathy machine’ as well as the opportunities these technologies offer to explore experiential, embodied and affective relations. The panel will be made up of a series of provocations and practice-research case studies that variously explore narrative re-imaginings, intergenerational collaboration, socially engaged place-making and participatory futuring with creative technologies.

In a city like Bristol (UK) – named by the 2017 Runnymede report as one of the most diverse yet divided cities in the UK – how might creative technologies offer us ways to facilitate embodied dialogue and invite young residents of a city to imagine new ways of using and sharing the city? Acknowledging a body of research located in social psychology that has begun to focus on how adolescents as a particular group can interrupt patterns of segregation in society (Taylor and McKeown, 2021; Taylor, 2020, Simpson, 2018), this paper will reflect on a pilot practice project - an engaged VR dance project. This project brought together young people from RISE Youth Dance Company (Bristol) and Virtual Reality filmmaker Aayush Dudhiya to experiment with co-creating 360° VR Dancing Postcards. The young people worked with the filmmaker and myself to explore site-responsive choreographic approaches and co-produced films that share their chosen location and communicate their experience of/ relationship to this location. Understanding that ‘words alone are not enough to express the totality of experience’ (Levy, 2014:1), this paper will reflect on how participants explored relationships to place using a combination of verbal and non-verbal methods and reflect on the possibilities for this to expose nuances in meaning and experience that cannot be communicated by either form of communication alone. In doing so, the paper aims to ask questions about the possibilities for creative practice to deepen residents’ understanding of each other’s experiences of place, to encourage new ways to imagine how they might engage with the city and seeks to imagine a better model for navigating our shared co-existence in public space.