This Lunchtime Talk will be broadcast live on Watershed's YouTube channel

In February, Tessa joined the Bristol and Bath Creative R&D ‘Expanded Performance’ research cohort, with a project exploring multi-user VR chat spaces, or ‘Social VR’, as emerging sites of ‘liveness’, ’togetherness’ and ‘performance’. 

In this talk Tessa considers how exclusion (and ultimately violence) have been ‘designed in’ to the architecture, avatars and interactivity of social VR. Tessa questions what is ‘performable’ inside spaces currently calibrated to a white, male, ableist conception of an ideal user. Their speculative design project explores new visions of Social VR made to subvert, queer and abandon this ‘ideal’. What could avatars look like? How could they move? How would users communicate, talk and touch inside virtual worlds designed around alternative visions of ideal users and communities.



Tessa will also discuss the responsibilities of Virtual Designers to respond to Real World problems, and attempt to articulate the impacts lockdown and global activist movements have had on this project. Finally, Tessa questions how this project can center the voices most critical to the re-imagining of public social space both on-and-off-line. 

Tessa is a resident of the Pervasive Media Studio and a PhD Candidate at the University of the West of Scotland. Their practice-based research explores queer perspectives in Virtual Reality documentary.

Join us on Fri 28th August, 13:00-14:00 for the talk and to take part in the discussion afterwards.

Watch live on YouTube