Inhabiting the Void – Virtuality as an Ability (Beyond Technology)

This lecture explores how we, as artists, stage transpersonal experiences through our work, leveraging immersive technologies to challenge and expand the human capacity for organizing perception into coherent worlds. We will discuss our practice of engaging with digital and online technologies, particularly in virtual and XR spaces, not merely as tools for constructing external environments but as mediums for introspection and connection. By navigating the interplay between immersive technologies and the interiority of the human body, we propose that virtuality extends beyond the technological into realms of deepened embodiment, creating opportunities for new forms of communication and relationality.

Through this lens, virtual and augmented realities emerge as instruments for bridging differences and fostering connections across species and ecosystems. For instance, we explore how rivers, ecosystems, and even non-human entities can be perceived and experienced in ways that blur the boundary between the external and the internal. Using an ongoing project River Biographies as a case study, we will demonstrate how immersive interventions can reshape audience perception - by surrendering inwards paradoxically they enhance their attunement to the outer world. Virtual Reality is reimagined as an invitation to inhabit both the void and the fullness of being by listening to the spaces between one another.

Duo Lundahl & Seitl:
The duo Lundahl & Seitl lives and works in Stockholm. Their immersive solo projects reinterpret the medium of the exhibition as interpersonal processes via choreography, matter and time and are presented around the world. They have developed a method and an art form comprising staging, choreographed movement, instructions, and immersive technologies, juxtaposed with material objects and the human ability to organize perception into a world. Their research is tacit, neuro-diverse, and heuristic. It relies on intuition in an iterative process of allowing concepts, theories and stories to meet the resistance of the physical world via sensory experience, direct observations and listening – often in collaborations with others, such as philosophers, anthropologists, writers, game-engine programmers, neurologists, politicians, curators, as well as the public. 

Participation in the talk is possible without prior registration via the following link: Inhabiting the Void – Virtuality as an Ability (Beyond Technology)

The talk is intended to provide impulses for the current university competition Performing in HfK – Virtual Spaces and invites all interested parties to an open exchange.

Organiser: We Dig It!