Digital Body Culture was a five-day research and development project I led at the Immersive Visualisation and Simulation Lab (IVSL) at Norwich University of the Arts. It explored what it means to inhabit and interact with digital bodies in immersive, technologically mediated spaces. Working with a multidisciplinary team of staff, technicians, and 15 students from the Computer Arts and Technology program, we investigated how identity, embodiment, and agency shift when our physical selves are mirrored, transformed, or replicated in digital form.

The First Lesson emerged from a period of collaborative R&D involving many different collaborators and modes of exploring ideas. Based on the book of poetry Crow by Ted Hughes, the work grew from my desire to share the questions, emotions, themes and reflections that the collection evokes. From the start, the project had no predetermined outcome. The final form, an interactive screen-based installation that invites the viewer into a dialogue, emerged through ideation, experimentation, and discovery during the creative process. Central to the final outcome is the idea of the encounter between audience and artefact, creating a participatory, posthuman dialogue that challenges traditional human-centred expectations of control.

Playtime was a three-month R&D project exploring how creativity can support parents of young children and make visible the lived realities of early parenthood. Led by Emma Zangs with a team of 14 collaborators, the project combined a 45-minute multidisciplinary performance, The Kids Are Fine, with two family play session models title Moving Words and Big Play. Across the project, 175 people engaged as participants, audiences, or collaborators.

On a recent visit to Ljubljana’s Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, I stumbled across Plastisapiens, a VR experience that reimagines evolution through the lens of plastic. Combining speculative eco-fiction with playful interactions, it shifted from informative to unsettling, before arriving at a strange, euphoric vision of symbiosis with plastic. The work unsettled, delighted and provoked in equal measure, reminding me of VR’s unique ability to turn difficult ideas into embodied, emotional experiences.

I just got back from Latitude Festival, where I had a great time running some storyboarding workshops as part of Norwich University of the Arts’ outreach programme. Set in the Enchanted Garden alongside workshops on life drawing and creating board games, our tent became a hub of imagination, colour and some pretty wild storytelling based on a narrative framework inspired by Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey

For the last talk in a series of short, accessible introductions to different strands of critical theory, I wanted to break the format and create an environment in which the students could collaboratively find their own meaning and their own understanding of the topics. The result was a kind of reverse lecture, scaffolded through a Miro board, anchored by memes, and centred on the gloriously unhinged fan project Shrek Retold.

So here’s the story. I was lucky enough to be invited to a private showing of Hinterlands, a mixed reality dance work created by Rebecca Evans and collaborators as Pell Ensemble. Hosted at Studio Wayne McGregor, the event gave me an intimate opportunity to experience an ambitious performance that explores embodiment, technology, and speculation about the more-than-human world.. All things that are right up my street!

This essay began with a workshop at Norwich University of the Arts inspired by The Creative Gene, a collection of essays by Hideo Kojima that explores the media that informed his creative practice. In the same spirit, I approached Das Oath’s self-titled album of 2004. What was it about this record? Its sound, its energy, it’s provocative awkwardness, that has stayed with me? Why did it matter so much then, and why does it matter still?