Projects
The Bestial Room
The Bestial Room
A site-specific immersive mixed-reality installation project merging physical sculptural objects/ costume/ prosthetics, with digital XR content.
Themes of disabled desire and late-capitalism shall be challenged.
'The Bestial Room', housed within a site-specific symbolic 'holding-space', shall be a collaborative, sensory affecting, immersive 'mixed-reality' installation project, cocooning its beholder in a 'claustrophobic' world of hyperreal sensory-simulation, embodied theatricality, and speculative-magical-realism.
This proposed elaborately-immersive installation, in its experimental 'microcosm' form, seeks to create a visually striking, viscerally provocative, and ultimately transformative audience experience- one that considers audience consent in a post #MeToo world and allows participatory choice, via creating progressive 'levels' of interactive mixed-reality content, allowing for intensifying engagement with potentially challenging/triggering content. Themes of non-heteronormative disabled desire/sexuality, ableist objectification/commodification, and abuses-of-power within our dystopian, algorithmic 'Techno-Capitalocene', conceptually underpin the project.
Through a phantasmagorical fusion of hallucinatory augmented mixed-reality, and sensory-stimulating, palpable materiality/tactility, this experimental immersive installation shall challenge and affect potential viewers/audience internalised prejudices/inequities through embodied emotional resonance.
Experiment
£20,000
Aims of the Project
- To collaborate with interaction-designer Joel Gethin-Lewis on creating a speculative ‘mixed-reality’ world.
- To collaborate and partner with creative-technologists at CCIXR- utilising their volumetric-capture/virtual-production/XR-studio facilities.
- To explore kinetic body-object extensions/costuming- to create a haptic/sensory audience experience (engaging all senses)- collaborating with animatronic designer Karl Gallivan.
- To symbolically utilise confined/claustrophobic physical space- directly exploring my lived experience as an isolated dis/abled ‘being’. The illusory immersive content representing a hallucinatory/psychological expanse- going beyond the physical confines of dis/abled embodiment.
- To consider and explore the configuration of the audience within this confined, sensory stimulating space.
- To develop worldbuilding/visual storytelling skills.
- To collaborate with choreographer Marie-Gabrielle Rotie on performative moments.
- To test this experimental immersive installation on a small, diverse audience at the site-specific ‘holding space’- their feedback will be crucial in the development/creation of a future ‘production’ phase. Tŷ Pawb has agreed to partner on the project, providing ‘critical friends’ support, and a space for further audience engagement
Meet the artist
Lauren Jane Williams
Lead artist
she/her
Lauren Jane Williams is a Welsh (rurally-based), disabled (EDS/CFS), neurodivergent (ASD), Queer, visual artist. She has a multidisciplinary, internationally collaborative practice, spanning installation, moving image, sculpture, costume/’body-object’ for durational live performance, ‘interspecies artmaking’, sound, and machine learning/emerging technologies.
Challenging and ‘unspoken’ cathartic themes surrounding ‘female’/childhood trauma (TW: as a survivor of childhood s*xual abuse with diagnosed cPTSD) has implicitly underpinned her wider artistic practice.
