This paper is an artistic self-criticism for my artwork entitled BirdMan VR. This work was created in 2023 as part of the BirdMan series, which I have been creating continuously since 2006. BirdMan is both an artistic experiment and a cognitive science thought experiment about a hypothetical being with a combination of human vision and bird vision. The thought experiment begins with the question of what it is like to be a bat, based on Buddhist epistemology's "five-fold (pañca skandha) and six-fold (ṣaḍ indriyāṇi)" and Thomas Nagle's "What is it like to be a bat?". A research paper on these works was published in 2015, BirdMan: Hybrid Perception.[1] This paper is an extension of that research, using the medium of VR and exploring issues of perception and consciousness from a 4E Cognition perspective, with a focus on binocular rivalry. What I want to see through the BirdMan Hybrid Perception art-science experiment is Qualia Landscapes. Qualia are controversial but important because they are deeply correlated with the individual's body and are expected to bridge the gap between body and mind. They can also be the first step towards understanding the other.

New affordable head-mounted displays and interactive virtual technologies provide new opportunities for researchers and practitioners to create and experience mindfulness. The use of virtual reality for art-based mindfulness practices is novel and promotes full-body, immersive experiences to improve mood, however, researchers and practitioners have a limited understanding of mindfulness and creativity in the virtual environment. This paper identifies the research gap by examining how active art-based mindfulness practices in virtual reality promote mindfulness, compared to passive methods such as viewing a virtual image to experience relaxation. Fourteen participants were interviewed in the qualitative ethnographic study. Methods included semi-structured interviews, direct observation, video-cued recall and thematic analysis, which were informed by flow, immersion and presence theories. The six main emerging themes from the participant colouring experiences included: (1) mindfulness; (2) mark-making; (3) space; (4) depth perception; (5) sense of time; and (6) agency. The data presented evidence that participants experienced mindfulness while colouring a virtual mandala and the emerging themes were intertwined with experiences of flow, immersion, and presence. The study benefits researchers and practitioners in understanding how creativity can enhance mindfulness in interactive virtual art environments.

Since 2021, OnBoardXR has been a festival platform for new short, live, theatrical performances based in a virtual reality space created in a customised fork of Mozilla Hubs. The OnBoardXR (OBXR) festival founders intentionally use the concepts of theatri-cality and live performance to engage virtual audiences using thea-tre etiquette, interpretation, and participation; simultaneously, over three years, the producers have also developed a project creation method mixing software development life cycles (SDLC) into the traditional theatrical rehearsal process. Performance creators typi-cally focus on software development in the early weeks, then tran-sition to more traditional co-present theatre tech/dress rehearsals in the week before the performances. This allows international multi-disciplinary artists to work together both asynchronously and in computer-based ‘real-time’ through recorded rehearsal and devel-opment videos, Discord messages and tags, and livestreaming. Frictions align with liveness in both co-present performance and real-time online technology – both human memory and internet connections can falter. In this article, I analyse each step in the process by comparing to traditional theatre production and SDLC; this analysis demonstrates a successful method of making online, virtual, interactive, live performances across multiple chronological formats, thus offering a formula for other artists in this space.