[ISEA2024] Paper: Sarah Neville — Embodied and Enacted Futures as Artistic Practice

Abstract

Keywords:
Speculative practices, Experiential Futures, Embodiment, Enaction, Virtual Reality, Participatory Practice, Futures Ethnography

This paper describes embodied and enacted futures as artistic practice as demonstrated through collaborative artistic projects discussed as a suit of immersive digital experiences – Spheres a Dance for Virtual Reality, Glasshouse Evocation and Transmittance. Each of these works are created through transdisciplinary collaboration across choreographic, sound and visual design, interactivity and game development combined through a distributed feminist artistic process. Embodied and enacted futures as artistic practice is informed by future studies, physical narratives and experiential design. These speculative future enactments are activated as immersive digital applications and embodied experiences. In each case the outcome of a futures driven process is a participatory work that evokes creativity and change for the participant through transformation.

  • Sarah Neville is an Adjunct Research Fellow at UniSA Creative/ IVE (Australian Research Centre for Interactive and Virtual Environments at the University of South Australia). She was awarded an Arts SA Established Artist Fellowship in 2021 to create virtual reality dance work. Sarah was awarded a dual award PhD from both Deakin University and Coventry University in dance digitization in 2022. Recent work has been shown at ANAT’s SPECTRA, Siggraph Vancouver, 7th Motion and Computing Conference, MOD and The Illuminate Festival.