This paper describes embodied and enacted futures as artistic practice as demonstrated through collaborative artistic projects discussed as a suit of immersive digital experiences - Spheres a Dance for Virtual Reality, Glasshouse Evocation and Transmittance. Each of these works are created through transdisciplinary collaboration across choreographic, sound and visual design, interactivity and game development combined through a distributed feminist artistic process. Embodied and enacted futures as artistic practice is informed by future studies, physical narratives and experiential design. These speculative future enactments are activated as immersive digital applications and embodied experiences. In each case the outcome of a futures driven process is a participatory work that evokes creativity and change for the participant through transformation.

Hekateris Dance is an Augmented Reality installation, converging past and present, to envisage a distant future, threatened by the extinction of many species on the Earth which has been impacted by climate change. Hekateris Dance acts as a provocation to imagine what we are becoming in a posthuman world beyond anthropocentrism where, as Rosi Braidotti asserts, we are in a state of becoming through the convergence of technology and organic matter in a “zoe/geo/techno assemblage”. This aligns with Donna Haraway’s proposition that we need to work in collaboration with other non-human beings to survive on a damaged planet. On entering the gallery, the visitor scans a QR code revealing a life-sized three-dimensional hybrid being which is transported into the exhibition space using Augmented Reality (AR) and is viewable through a mobile phone. The avatar invites participation in the ritual of dance, using contemporary movements but in homage to the ancient Greek dance of the Hekateris, as a celebration of the natural world. This practice-based research project explores how AR can be utilised through playful interaction and storytelling as a discursive tool to prompt audiences to take action in order to be part of the change in achieving net zero.

The interface between creative technology, dance performance, choreographic process, and place ecology is a rich area for research. In particular, the interplay between dance notation and digital drawing. This paper shares a personal exploration of the convergence between body, place, movement, choreography, and digital dance drawing as art and place ecologies. Where the inherent need to connect with nature and place coexists as the everywhen.

Artist residencies offer opportunities for creative interaction between different cultures, communities, and practitioners. Beyond providing time and space, hosts facilitate artists’ immersive social encounters with place, allowing them to explore unfamiliar processes of experimentation. Drawing on a case study of a robotics and arts-based residency, which birthed the choreographed robotic installation ‘First Kiss’, this short paper considers the complex rhythms of transdisciplinary collaboration; their awkward intimacies challenging seamless trajectories of innovation.