Extended Reality (XR), a term that encompasses the spectrum of technologies from Virtual Reality (VR) to Augmented reality (AR), has expanded rapidly. Smartphones and AR glasses have the ability to superimpose virtual objects/characters onto real-world views, while VR head-mounted displays (HMDs) can immerse audiences in simulated, fictional worlds. The increasing ubiquity of XR represents a disruption of perception; cybercultural speculations and science fictions now constitute the facts of daily life. However, creative practitioners, audiences and pedagogical frameworks lack a cohesive grammar or vocabulary to engage with the technologies from their respective positions. PIX-ART will address this knowledge deficit by developing a new cultural theory of XR using the theoretical and scholarly practices of scenography – a sub-sector of the performing arts focusing on the practice, conceptualization, execution and/or analysis of work using technical and design-led methodologies.
In recent years scenography, as a term and concept, has been expanded from its simple understanding as set design to consider audio-visual, participatory, immersive, site-specific and design-led approaches to performance practice (McKinney and Palmer 2017). These qualities have now been extended into the realm of digital technologies by the PI (O’Dwyer 2021). Digital Scenography celebrates performances that are conceived and devised through design processes where the dramaturgical vision is guided by the mise-en-scène and availability of digital materials and environmental conditions, which pivotally influence the concept and shape the experience. While these technologies present exciting ways to engage audiences in interactive plastic and visual art, the centralisation of the human at the heart of performance and its inherent interdisciplinarity have greater potential to push the technologies to their limits. By staging inventive embodied, corporeal research experiments, theatre represents a new social laboratory for inventing new forms of intersubjectivity. The goal of PIX-ART is to harness these discipline-specific qualities and time-honoured methods to contribute to the establishment of a nascent grammar of XR.