Within contemporary post-humanist discourse and critical spatial practices, immersive media (XR) offers a unique site to investigate the boundaries of embodiment and situated cognition. This session shares the practical explorations of XR as an epistemological and non-linear narrative tool for Knowing, re-arranging body-space and de-familiarizing anthropocentric perspectives in spatial production. Participants are invited to examine how, or if at all, the ‘forced first-person view’ of immersive environments can provoke new relational understanding of more-than-human environments.
This session will start with approx. 30 min presentation of Du’s practice on probing the body-space amid immersive media with a more-than-human approach. It follows an approx. 30 min of whiteboard workshop, where the participants will depart from their own bodily experience and immediate environments to think, write, draw, or stitch images, collectively weaving alternative narratives and mapping entangled spaces of more-than-human intra-actions.
Du Zhang is an artist and designer who explores how human and machines co-sense and co-create realities. She currently teaches and develops new format of learning on 3D/XR at the DLC Art Lab in the Muthesius University of Arts and Design in Kiel, Germany. Through her practice, she is developing sensing methods that convey embodied knowledge, inviting beings to experience how the body, technology and environment think and feel together, in the attempt to reclaim agency through poetic, sensory forms of becoming and world-making.