Artistic Strategies Towards a Possible Performative Approach to Embodiment in VR

Creating and experiencing immersive virtual environments with a performative nature designed for Virtual Reality (VR), demand for an artist to face complex and peculiar strategies of embodiment, it needs answering questions related to the relationship between the body in the physical world and the virtual environment and finally it needs addressing the ethical aspect of subjecting participant to a forced disembodiment, that could be quite traumatic for some. The present paper provides a brief introduction to some key questions arisen during the initial steps of my artistic research in the field of audiovisual immersive environments. My attempt is to approach the subject from the experiential, rather than the technological point of view, putting VR in continuity with a tradition of performance and sonic arts, presenting an overview of some of the premises, directions, as well as challenges for a possible approach towards the relationship between human body and machine generated virtual environments in VR