A collaborative research and practice project with T Braun (https://www.tbraun.art) that brings audiences through portals of queer disorientation and glitched embodiment using virtual environments, soundscape and poetry.
We were interested in how the disorienting, disabling, or dissociation of embodied experiences as part of queerness and transness can open new possibilities for solidarity and collectivity. Social virtual reality was a way for us to materialize these existentially charged experiences into an experimental sandbox of space, sound, pixels and language.
The project resulted in a pair of virtual environments on the popular social VR platform VRChat, an interactive visual lecture, a video installation, and a zine. The lecture and interactive installation was presented at Concordia University’s Fourth Wall in July 2023. The video installation was included in Sussex University’s Digital Humanities Lab with a commissioned zine that was added to the Sussex University library’s archive.
Video walkthrough of performance environments:
T and hexe.exe created a pair of immersive 3d environments on a virtual reality social media platform. The worlds unfurl colorfully undulating landscapes from a shared pool of assets: procedurally shattered spheres, AI generated organs, saturated glassy textures, loops of poetry, and surreal bits of architecture.
Entering the worlds with body tracking and VR headsets, visitors feel new spatial and body relationships impossible to the IRL world. Here the ground curves up to defy the horizon, bodies get stuck in vertexes, freeing viewpoints from head, nearby surfaces wobble in disjointed response to touch, first opaque then disappearing. Throughout is the gentle rise and fall of soundscapes and our reading from our collaborative writing and excerpts from queer theory. It’s a sometimes queasy, mostly playful, eventually meditative experience.
The project is a site for ongoing research collaboration between hexe.exe and T. We frequently reference Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism, Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch’s Crip Technoscience Manifesto as well as other poets and theorists working in performance studies.
The virtual worlds make this research practice available to a massive international user base of the virtual social platform VRChat. Within this user base is an undercommons of radical queer and trans experimentation in community, embodiment, creative expression and solidarity.
We also stage live streamed events from the spaces that blend lecture, artist talk and performance for audiences outside of the virtual world.