Entangling Designer, System and Participant: An Interdisciplinary Methodological Account for Reimagining Embodied Knowledge in VR

The design of interactions for immersive environments is a process and a craft that connects diverse disciplines and methodologies. Informed by theories in posthumanism and human-computer in-teraction, this paper aims to explore the ideas that emerged during the implementation of a series of actor training exercises in VR. This work is part of a broader research project that focuses on re-imagining embodied techniques of training that were developed by Odin Teatret. For this particular experiment, we selected three exer-cises to work with and translated their intrinsic qualities into interac-tive environments, drawing from Diana Taylor’s notion of scenarios as meaning-making paradigms. Meeting this challenge required crafting our own tactics which include three theoretical concepts that address the intricacies of the work, along with a unique de-sign process. The concepts that we will expand on in this paper are “translation”, “agency”, and “event”. “Translation”, in our context, entails the preservation of embodied meaning recorded as motion capture data used as the primary source to create a virtual archive. The notion of “agency” helps us understand the intentionality of each agent of a VR project as an emergent property of the expe-rience. Lastly, the concept of “event” interprets the dramaturgy of interactive artworks as encounters to be experienced through the participants’ bodies. These concepts replace a strict methodology as a common ground to navigate the complexities of a collabora-tive project and the instability of working with new technologies.