Synopsis
A collaboration with artist and scholar T Braun, this research-creation project offers an interlinked pair of virtual reality worlds and interwoven strands of poetic writing.
Presented at Concordia University’s Fourth Wall in 2023. Zine commissioned for and printed by the Sussex Humanities Lab in 2023.
Background
Inspired by our shared interest in Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, T and I created virtual worlds to model and provoke questions about how our bodies move through the world as queer and trans people. My world used procedural shapes generated from noise to place a player in a subsuming landscape. By moving across patterns of repetition and disintegration I wanted to create a loosening of the certainty of individuation. T and I shared materials such as models and textures to visually link our worlds and discuss our creative decisions.
Following the world design, we invited audiences to visit the world with us and respond to their experiences. From these audience experiences and in response to our design conversations we wrote a zine of poetry and theory about what the virtual world and glitch offer our understandings of queerness, transness, and embodiment.
Stills
From our virtual worlds. T’s world is shown in the first two images. Mine in the second.
An avatar stands center frame of a rolling landscape. The ground swirls with green and ochre lighning textures. Spheres rise against a wireframe sky.
A close up of two avatars, cartoon octopus figures with human eyes. The avatars are frozen in a glitch and caught between renderings of transparency and reflection.
A procedurally fragmented sphere that can be picked up as a game object with interactive physics properties.
Looking across a procedurally generated landscape that rolls away in mountains and valley from the point of view. Above is a fragmented plane that dapples the light.
Zine
“Aggregate/multitude” a poem from our zine. T’s text is italicized, mine is formatted normally. We wind our voices together with a swirling text layout.
Full Text