Real Virtual Games work-in-progress (excerpt 2)

by Isabel Valverde, António Caramelo, Jorge Gonçalves performance by Jorge Gonçalves, Inês Negrão, Marlon Franco virtual character animation by Helena Figueiredo Real Virtual Games (RJV) is a co-autored transdisciplinary project involving contemporary dance and media. Proposing an alternative hybrid embodied architecture for physical-virtual spaces through which its live and avatar inhabitants communicate, RJV questions the immersive (physical and software) interfaces of videogames and social places (Second Life), in its deployment of handicapted (dis)embodiments. Through constructive deconstruction, we generate possible aesthetic windows, experimenting other applications for the commercial apparatuses in order to alter and estrange what has became too familiarly embodied interactions and perceptions. Experiencing an emerging posthuman corporeality concerned with the subjective and collective hybrid and mutable realities within the globalized virtuality of our contemporary still Cartesian bio-information condition. Departing from the dislocation of the virtual into the physical space, and vices versa, this project is situated in the reflection about the challenges to embodiment posed by increasingly immersive interfaces, particularly the massive adoption of virtual sites as real time communicative models. Through a constant intertwining of dimensions of experience, RVG advances in the virtualization of physicality (space and bodies) and the embodying of virtuality, where corporeal and virtual are interconstitutive aspects of the very hybrid realities created and perceived. Parallel real time interactions are developed towards situating the performative action in associations with real-simulated virtual immersive environments. These interactions are complex for allowing multiple readings of the simultaneous interfacings at play. Through a practice based exploration of posthuman corporealities where technologies of virtuality and materiality become fully impregnated in our ways of behaving, relating and communicating, we aim towards a conscious and transforming creative familiarization of the very technologies, aware of their reductive and expansive effects to our physicality, modes of perception and reasoning capacities. VRG includes practices of appropriation of VR on-line environments and virtual beings as well as real world artifacts. Provoking momentary disorientations, these help regaining a renewed embodied awareness that includes the confluence of virtual entities towards an emerging posthuman subjectivity. The processing of bodily movements nourishes the interlinking of materials and artistic disciplines to reveal an organicity of the mediated elements. Emphasizing the deployment of choreographic process and of audio and visual representations/depictions of the spatial and temporal experience in/between realities. Via such presence and movement mediating apparatuses, we develop choreographic situations experimenting with altering and estranging common embodied interactions and perceptions, towards experiencing an emerging posthuman corporeality in renewed embodied perceptions of our particular realities within contemporary condition. Whereas one performer engages in the VR immersion facilitated by the VR glasses, while contacting with the other performers mainly through touch, the other performers are immersed in the physical space, where their movement relations generate sound and images through a 'interactive' device, along with following the VR space and bodies projections. In the virtual on-line environment, the autonomous virtual performer engages with the virtual site and the physical performer through its avatar. The audience members are asked to experience the multiple mediated immersions and to establish associations amongst the connected realities, and are invited to engage with the interface systems before and or after the performance.

YouTube | April 14, 2008