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The living threshold / Altered States. An ecological approach to queering immersive experiences

Immersion has been central for various art practices and fields, from music, painting or theatre to newer ones such as audiovisual or installation art. In recent years, with VR commercially available, immersion has been adopted as a buzzword by the entertainment and consumer electronics industries as part of their commercial strategies. As a result the term has become almost synonymous with specific technologies and experiences (often disengaging realistic visual spectacles), which are permeated by ideological qualities (realism, homogenisation, visual predominance, passivity, novelty), and responsible for practices leading to rapid obsolescence and waste proliferation. This artistic research questions these problematic aspects, using poetic strategies and experimental and reflective practices, to expose the ideologies at work. At the same time it attempts to research alternative solutions for immersive artistic productions, exploring low-tech, DIY, DIT approaches – to adapt, recycle and repair rather than contribute to the production of electronic waste and corporate wealth. If the industry seeks for a transparent, objectified technology, erasing its own agency as much as possible to create credible visual illusions, instead this research aims at producing sonic and embodied immersive pieces. It builds on the peculiar experience determined by the encounter with a technological interface, pointing at the intricacy of entanglement between material and immaterial layers.

The context of this artistic research is an intersection between electronic and new music, site-specific installation art, immersive media and disciplines such as acoustics and DIY electroacoustic lutherie.
It stems from my artistic practice, which, born in music composition, soon spilled over neighbouring fields, keeping together often heterogeneous, non- standard practices. The research investigates the transformative processes that working with unstable, unpredictable and often non conventional materials, spaces and technologies put in action within my creative processes, teaching me to blur and redefine the relationship between composer, performer, instruments and performance space.
The artistic practice, leading to a number of sound and music pieces, the cyclical reflection on these processes, as well as the constant dialogue with fellow researchers and practitioners, read through the lenses of new materialist, queerfeminist theory and sonic ecology, pushed me to question traditional individualistic assumptions on creative agency. Shifting the locus of the creative process from the mind of the individual creator, to the intra-active moment of encounter, as outlined by Karen Barad between human and non-human agents performing together within specific sonic ecosystems, in the definition given by Agostino Di Scipio, this thesis explores and investigates the conditions of these encounters in my own artistic practice as well as that of a small group of fellow practitioners.
The threads collected in this thesis, although not providing a unifying all- encompassing theory, nevertheless map out a territory of possible paths, iden- tifying the urgency of a plural, processual and performative re-definition of creativity, small seeds of crisis to help break and replace the traditional ideolo- gies of originality, geniality and individuality, borrowed from romanticism and inherited by late-capitalism we still rely on to speak about art.

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