Audio-Visual-Haptic Screendance

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A QuestLab Project. 

Funded by Studio Wayne McGregor.

With additional support from UCL, London College of Music and Sense.

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Audio-Visual-Haptic Screendance is a research project aiming to develop innovative wearable haptic technology which will add a third sensorial dimension to the act of watching dance film, transforming it into an immersive bodily experience.

 

Working with dance artists with varied lived experience of perception, and by tapping into touch sensations, the AVH project will create technology that will manifest the bodily experience of watching dance film, and that will help us to unlearn privilege-based perimeters around perceptive faculty. We propose not to substitute lacking sensory modes of perception, but simply to offer further modes of perception so a greater scope of people can engage more fully with screendance work. 

 

We propose to make fundamentally accessible work; not to make our work accessible. We ask of our ‘viewers', that they all - regardless of seeing/hearing ability - engage with the dampened sensorial perceptive abilities in their person, and in doing so, reawaken and re-learn them in order to develop an expanded relationship with their lived experience of the world.

 

​AVH is a dance and film project made in collaboration between choreographer and dance and film artist, Jo Cork; film and gaming composer, Bartosz Szafranski; and creative technologist and haptics specialist, Ava Agakouchak. 

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The first design sprint of the project ran in 2021, after a long delay due to Covid. The findings of the initial research will be presented at Studio Wayne McGregor in early 2022, before the project continues development. 

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