Performativity and Worldmaking

Abstract

author and editor of several books and chapters related to the concept of intermediality, but lately you also started to develop a special VR installation, Hamlet Encounters, together with Eric Joris and other professionals. Can you tell me a bit more about it and its context? The VR installation Hamlet Encounters is part of a larger project in which we try to find out what we can do with new technologies in live performances. In the case of Hamlet Encounters we are experimenting with virtual reality and motion capture. We try to combine these technologies, wondering what we can do with these and what these can do with us. In our practice as research project we primarily focus on the performative aspects of the media we use: how do media redefine our sense, play in the sense of affecting our senses, how can we make media also playful in the way we use them for building worlds, for staging, for self-referencing and self-reflecting? 1 This interview was made within the framework of the Exploratory Research Project Rethinking Intermediality in Contemporary Cinema: Changing Forms of In-Betweenness, PN-III-ID-PCE-2016-0418, funded by a grant of the UEFISCDI (Executive Unit for Financing Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation), Romania.

Trust and Technologies of Sense. VR and Proprioception in Hamlet Encounters

“…This outside experience helps to build trust both in the environment and the staff of the VR production. The technical parameters achieve that "not only the illusion is visible, but the creation of the illusion as well" (Kattenbelt, 2019).…”

“…You immediately sense how your eyes and ears are redefined, and then you have to find out with your physical body how to relate to it. (Kattenbelt, 2019) Anna Eifert argues that in this new world of telematics and telepresence we are experiencing a loss of confidence in our perception system. Our senses cannot be trusted anymore, and this process began with the medium of the photography.…”