Please note: This event took place in Aug 2020
In February, Tessa Ratuszynska joined the Bristol+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 Lunchtime 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 will also explore how this project can centre 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.