XR Performance Study 02: The Play
Audience → Digital Environment & Avatar → Performer
This work is part of an ongoing research series investigating the relationships between audience, performer, virtual avatar, and digital environment within participatory performance systems.
Through a series of experiments, different channels of influence are tested and compared to examine how agency, perception, and feedback emerge across physical and virtual spaces.
In this experiment, audience input alters the virtual environment, which in turn affects the performer’s physical and spatial conditions. The performer’s movement is mapped onto a digital avatar, creating a feedback loop between audience, environment, body, and representation.
Performance Structure
Audience members use game controllers to manipulate the virtual environment.
These changes affect a digital avatar that remains narratively connected to the performer.
As the avatar undergoes transformation, the performer responds within the live performance, creating a feedback loop between audience action, virtual space, and embodied experience.
Like Study 01, the work examines the relationship between selfhood and external influence, but through a mediated digital system rather than direct physical intervention.
Research Observation
Compared to Study 01, this configuration produced a weaker sense of personal agency and responsibility.
While participants retained influence over the performance, the controller-based interaction created a more collective and anonymous mode of engagement.
The distance introduced by the digital interface reduced the immediacy of bodily consequence, shifting participants from co-performers toward operators of a system.
Chapter
Chapter 01: The Whisper puts a webcom onto the Child (performer) and the Self (avatar) appears.
Chapter 04: The fabrics start to directly control the Self and even the Child is influenced.
Chapter 02: The Child and the Self dance in harmony.
Chapter 05: Both the Child and the Self are exhausted; the Whisper guides the audience to put the controllers around the Child. They fight against the Walls of Expectations brought by the controllers. The Self is devoured.
Chapter 03: Fabrics controlled by audience members appear and collide with the Self, distorting the movements and generating sound cues.
Chapter 06: The Child for the first time looks back and sees the screen and endless duplicates of herself. She takes the camera down and aims it towards her own face.
Prototype Video Documentation
Exhibitions
Media Commons, 370 Jay Street, Brooklyn NY, 2025
La MaMa Galleria, New York NY, 2025
A Space Gallery — London, 2025