Virtual Creativity - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2017

The experience of the body in the Metaverse is not always an experience of the flesh, at least regarding the avatar. Even though virtual experiences can trigger a physical dimension of the senses, these sensations are lived by the body in front of the screen, rather than by the avatar’s body, which may function as an expressive element. The avatar may be crucial in communicating with others (as language) and play a role in the users’ access and interaction with the virtual world (as experience). A tension between language and experience opens up a new and fundamental aesthetic territory in the avatar, demanding a reconfiguration of concepts and processes involved in its creation and embodiment. This article aims to explore how virtual corporeality may emerge from this tension in the manipulation of avatars in Creative Collaborative Virtual Environments (CCVE), what affordances enable this emergence and how it impacts aesthetic and creative experience.

Space art and art within virtual worlds share conceptual and even ontological commonalities. There are three issues that can be examined in relation to these: the ‘problem of gravity’, the extensions of the body and the issue of scientific abstraction. Several art projects will be discussed relating to these themes including the Futurist manifestos of aerial art, space poetry, Babeli’s Come to Heaven, and Živadinov’s Biomechanics Noordung and Noordung:: 1995–2045.

This article – comprising a series of notes − explores the field of contemporary artists’ research in(to) varying gravitational states. It is anchored in a discussion of zero gravity, derived from my own participation in a parabolic flight above Star City in Moscow in 2001 (Arts Catalyst MIR flight 001). The audio interviews, video documentation and e-mail correspondence gathered pre and post-flight, have variously informed my thinking into the unparalleled physical, psychological and philosophical effects that can be experienced. The notion of the MIR flight offering productive material for art making is contextualized within a longer timeline of my own personal experiences in specific research environments being subjected to (recorded) scientific study. This earlier lab activity initially resulted in artworks where the intersubjectivities of scientist and subject were foregrounded, however, a persistent consideration had been the agency of technology in effecting physical phenomena. As will be emphasized, the temporary transformative states experienced in a parabolic flight are strongly affective and meaningful. I will argue that parabolic flight produces ‘intra-action’ (to use physicist Karen Barad’s term), a process whereby bodies, technologies, discourses, gravitational variants and vibration momentarily come into being with enduring significance.

For the earth-bound artist, simply imagining having an extended microgravity experience and orbital perspective is a delicious phantasmagorical feat, but the chance to embrace the astronaut 2.0 of the commercial spaceflight era is fast becoming a reality (Armstrong 2014: 131). As a live artist I have gained valuable insights by working as a commercial diver and simulation astronaut, and I am now training for suborbital flight (Pothier 2014: 121). The aim of my body of work is to develop effective research strands and successful partnerships that will address the urgent need for knowledge of changes in human expression caused and inspired by these extreme environmental interactions. The underexplored bodily transformation beyond the impact of the Earth’s environment inspires new directions in my work from sea, to summit, to space. Performing Astronautics (2017–18) builds on my ongoing experimental and emerging aquatic arts practice (Pell 2014: 98). Its ambition is to first address the challenge of translating first-person tacit knowledge embedded in the astronautic body (Garan 2015) and connecting this with existing theoretical understandings of space-based embodiment from an Earth-based logic (Pell and Mueller 2016) (grounded, pedestrian, linear) and sea-based sensitivity (buoyant, hydrous, flowing) (Pothier 2014: 123) and then, by connecting performing arts practice with astronautics, externalizing how space impacts the human body/mind cadence to alter motion, rhythm, and perception of time/place spatiality in new ways. The opportunity to harness the oftenintangible qualities of microgravity experience into an Earthly practice proposes to start to build somatic or corporeal literacy of the environmental impact of outer space on contemporary performance. New strategies for space adaptation, greater opportunities for personal expression and degrees of freedom, and interdisciplinary knowledge transfer for future mission performance may also arise.

This piece of art writing imagines gravity and falling as quotidian experiences. There are two main characters: Muni (the name can be translated as Patterns, from the Korean original) and Garu (meaning Dust in Korean). Muni is undertaking a journey to a zero-gravity training facility in the small town of Shankill, Ireland; Garu works as a community-based psychologist. I chart her investigation of falling by taking a series of photographs and creating an installation. The installation is a room dusted with white powder, in which is hand-written a paragraph from a novel. This piece of art writing was exhibited as Language but No Words at the Space Mom Museum in Chungju, Korea in 2012.