by Lisa May Thomas and Debbie Watson
In late October 2023 Lisa May Thomas and Debbie Watson took a VR workshop to the Situated Caring Ecologies conference at Portsmouth University. This was part of a themed section / series of talks, for which the title was ‘sticking with the dance, caring over time’. The two workshops were short, twenty minutes long, with up to eight participants in each.
The workshops were aimed at exploring the intangible environments we all inhabit, of air and water – how air and water flows and moves – within, outside, around, and between the spaces and places we inhabit, and our bodies.
Lisa offered a movement based somatic tuning practice as an on-boarding activity, then the participants took turns to enter VR, working in pairs to support and guide one another. We wanted to use the VR world of Soma to mediate experiences of simulated watery and airy worlds, to speculate on future environments, and provoke and question how we might inhabit and care for / as them.
The conference, over the two days we were there, was full of interesting talks, provocations, community projects, and practices – most of which centred around the design process and co-production of spaces within urban, built environments. Our contribution brought up questions about the less tangible aspects of these spaces and our bodies as/within them. Spaces which are not defined by edges and borders to bump up against physically, but by more subtle sensations such as the temperature of the air against our skin, or the thickness or density of the space around us.
We particularly enjoyed the many ways in which the presenters visualised their projects, ideas, and processes as maps and diagrams, which raised questions around how we might map our own conversations within the context of the conference. Theories on the ethics of care predominated many of the discussions as we thought about how to design spaces for humans that cared with (Tronto) communities and the environment. Terminology and processes from the field of dance were also used in several of the talks, as a way of exploring and expressing ideas around the design of spaces, their functionality and use for and with bodies. Laban’s notions of ‘kinesphere’ and ‘dynamosphere’, were used as frameworks for our discussion in the themed group, alongside feminist notions of bodies and their temporalities (with theorists including Barad and Manning).
It was fascinating to explore how embodied practices with VR have the potential to intervene in and contribute to conversations about how futures spaces are considered. These interdisciplinary conversations across arts, social science and architecture and design thinking are key to the sociodigitial futures that are claimed, imagined, made.
These workshops were part of the first steps of a larger project which explores river futures and aims to explore how a particular community of water-users and experts relate to a specific natural body of water. It will involve creative explorations of sensory, emotional and affective relationships with water, while encompassing the complex networks of actors and infrastructures that exist in and around these relationships.
Given that a river is a conceived, documented and datafied space, as much as a living and liveable space, we are posing the question: How do humans exist within a wider network of non-humans around rivers? Animate and inanimate, technological and sedimental, these actors are part of the relationships that communities develop with water.
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