Abstract
Keywords:
Augmented Reality, Speculative, Narrative, Convergence, Posthuman, Geology, Sustainability, Interaction, Agency
Hekateris Dance is an Augmented Reality installation, converging past and present, to envisage a distant future, threatened by the extinction of many species on the Earth which has been impacted by climate change. Hekateris Dance acts as a provocation to imagine what we are becoming in a posthuman world beyond anthropocentrism where, as Rosi Braidotti asserts, we are in a state of becoming through the convergence of technology and organic matter in a “zoe/geo/techno assemblage”. This aligns with Donna Haraway’s proposition that we need to work in collaboration with other non-human beings to survive on a damaged planet. On entering the gallery, the visitor scans a QR code revealing a life-sized three-dimensional hybrid being which is transported into the exhibition space using Augmented Reality (AR) and is viewable through a mobile phone. The avatar invites participation in the ritual of dance, using contemporary movements but in homage to the ancient Greek dance of the Hekateris, as a celebration of the natural world. This practice-based research project explores how AR can be utilised through playful interaction and storytelling as a discursive tool to prompt audiences to take action in order to be part of the change in achieving net zero.
- Charlotte Gould is a senior academic in the School of Art and Media at the University of Brighton, UK. She has taught all levels of Visual Communication and supervises PhD students. Through her practice she explores the potential for interactive installations in digitally mediated public spaces, promoting public participation through shared experience. She has developed Extended Reality artworks to prompt play and interaction across social and cultural boundaries as well as interactive nonlinear narratives and speculative fiction, which explore how we can communicate the threat of ecological crisis, raising public awareness to trigger change in behaviours. Through interactive installations she tests the boundaries of open systems, to offer opportunity for diverse audiences to cocreate artworks, impacting on the way we engage in the urban environment and public space and contributing to a collective memory of place in a global context.