Virtual reality headsets can place audiences inside digitally created environments. Augmented and mixed reality technologies can introduce virtual objects, characters and information into physical surroundings. As these technologies become more widely available, they are changing how people experience stories, spaces and one another.
XR offers exciting possibilities for theatre, performance and the visual arts. Audiences may be able to move through a story, encounter performers in virtual spaces or influence how an experience unfolds. These possibilities also raise important questions. How do we describe these new forms of performance? What kinds of artistic choices do they offer? How do they change the relationship between artists and audiences?
PIX-ART investigates these questions by bringing together performance, design and computer science. Through creative experiments, case studies and theoretical research, the project explores how XR can be used to make, experience, understand and teach performance.
Why scenography?
Scenography is sometimes understood simply as set design. Today, however, the term has a much broader meaning. It encompasses the spatial, visual, sonic, technological and sensory elements through which a performance is created and experienced.
A scenographic approach recognises that design does more than provide a background for a performance. Space, sound, light, objects, images and technologies can actively shape its meaning and determine how an audience encounters it.
This is particularly important in XR. Audiences do not necessarily remain outside the action, looking at a scene from a fixed position. Their movement, viewpoint, choices and physical responses may become part of how the work unfolds.
PIX-ART builds on expanded understandings of scenography developed within contemporary performance research (McKinney and Palmer 2017; O’Dwyer 2021). It considers how physical and virtual environments can be designed together, and how those environments affect performers, audiences and the relationships between them.
Performance provides a valuable testing ground for this research because it brings bodies, spaces, technologies and social interaction together. By creating and studying XR performances, PIX-ART examines not only what these technologies can do, but how they can be used critically, creatively and meaningfully.
Our research questions
PIX-ART is guided by four main research questions:
- How can we map and describe the different forms of XR performance that are emerging?
This includes examining the different roles available to audiences and the kinds of agency – or capacity to act on and influence an experience – that XR technologies can provide.
- How do the distinctive materials, techniques and technologies of XR shape relationships between creators and audiences?
We are interested in how features such as immersion, interaction, spatial sound, virtual environments and embodied participation affect how performances are made and experienced.
- How is XR changing the ways in which performance is taught and studied?
The project considers how educators can introduce these technologies critically and creatively, and how established approaches to performance education may need to evolve.
- How can these findings contribute to a new practical and theoretical framework for XR performance and scenography?
By bringing together insights from performance practice, design, audience experience and education, PIX-ART aims to develop a clearer language for understanding this emerging field.
What will PIX-ART contribute?
PIX-ART aims to create a practical and cultural language for XR performance that will:
- help artists develop new creative processes and forms of expression
- help audiences recognise, interpret and discuss different kinds of XR performance
- provide researchers with clearer terms and frameworks for analysing this emerging art form
- support educators in introducing XR performance into teaching and curricula
- strengthen dialogue between the performing arts, design and computer science
Ultimately, the project seeks to make XR performance more understandable, accessible and useful – not only as a collection of new technologies, but as an evolving field of artistic practice.