An Alien Phenomenology in Dance: Virtual Telematic Performances as Embodied Philosophy

This article suggests that dance practice-led exploration of avatar embodiment and telematic performance in 3D virtual environments (such as those generated in real-time graphics engines) can be a meaningful mode of philosophical discovery—a mode of affective doing, creating, becoming, and embodied thinking. By exerting kinaesthetic agency and shared expression within corporeal forms that are both of our body and yet virtual as well as in avatar representations that do not necessarily correlate to our actual anatomical articulation, can we explore a new remote relationality of extended, non-human, or alien embodiment within virtual space? I explore the possibility that, if this experience is indeed philosophical, it can be expansive and joyous, critically and socially engaged, and even ethical in nature, despite the techno-political forces of capture and control which are understood to be at work in so-called volumetric regimes. To consider this I draw upon a proposed alignment of ideas from Ian Bogost (from “procedural rhetoric” to alien phenomenology) and from Laura Marks (unfolding-enfolding aesthetics and the “talisman image”) to think about virtual media forms that enhance dance’s inherent virtuality and its propensity for kinaesthetic metaphorism, ethical intersubjectivity, and play.