This first part of the chapter will now share how I incorporate interdimensional movement from modernism into my work as a contemporary artistic researcher and how I intertwine this approach with Speculative Fabulation from speculative fiction to create my own methodological framework of INTERDIMENSIONAL ARTISTIC SPECULATION.

ENGAGING INTERDIMENSIONAL MOVEMENT

As unpacked in the chapter “Conversations with the Field”, this PhD project engages with the avant-garde’s interdimensional and higher-dimensional speculation, aligning its methodologies with the aesthetic strategies that modernists derived from mathematics and astronomy. Fundamentally, dimensional geometry has long been central to the artistic aesthetics of image-making, drawing on the linear Renaissance perspective of approximating three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. This PhD takes inspiration from art historical arguments stating that the avant-garde’s break with representation was heavily influenced by the new curved and higher-dimensional, non-Euclidean geometry of mathematician Georg Bernhard Riemann, and the subsequent ontological effects this had in science and society. In this way, interdimensional speculation influenced the modernist project, which hoped for a similar revolutionary shift in the aesthetic and formal realms, allowing artists to break free from classical linear perspective representation, and subsequently from the boundaries of the visual, the material, and normative or rational aspects of society.

When engaging with interdimensional movement as an artistic method, I draw on these practices and perspectives of modernist art movements. As noted earlier, I do believe there is a historical interdimensional legacy that continues in contemporary art, particularly within the expanded media practices relevant to this project. Since this historical context is not widely recognised, I have made an effort to map it more extensively in the PhD reflection, in the chapter “Conversations with the Field”.

This interdimensional focus has been highly generative for the PhD project, in that it has given me a clearer understanding of the historical context of my artistic development and a language for the mechanisms behind the aesthetic choices, methods, and strategies in the work. As a methodological vehicle, interdimensional speculation has led to new aesthetics and articulations, or "findings" within the project.

One specific point of alignment with the modernist tradition is using interdimensional speculation to break established aesthetic, formal, and conceptual boundaries, thereby serving as a reflective tool. I have explored how interdimensional movement—both formally and speculatively within the performative installations—creates a space for reflection, allowing for shifts in perspective, the possibility of holding multiple viewpoints, and breaking away from linear or normative worldviews. From this, I have also found that interdimensional speculation has offered a way to explore transformations in worldview by facilitating movement between context and content. Furthermore, engaging with extra dimensions—dimensions beyond our perception—has provided insights into how we might relate to the invisible or the cognitively elusive.

CONCRETE DESCRIPTIONS

OF INTERDIMENSIONAL MOVEMENT

When exploring how movement between dimensions and into possible expanded dimensions can occur in the performative installations, I draw on mathematical descriptions of these dimensional relationships. This exploration is contextualised by sources that modernist artists used to inform their aesthetic choices. Below, I will attempt to describe aspects of the approach in more concrete terms.

Breaking Up Linear Perspective

To kick us off, I return to a closer look at classical linear perspective. It was developed in the Renaissance as a method to give the illusion of three-dimensional SPACE on a two-dimensional PLANE by establishing a fixed vantage POINT to view the scene from and letting perspectival LINES extend out from this. In representational art, this way of using point and line to support the illusion of space on a plane became a normative, neutralised (almost invisible) way to approach visual representation. It also required the viewer to be outside the viewed, and so was part of the construction of the scientific, disembodied position of objectivity. This was exactly what the avant-gardes rebelled against by moving between dimensions, through exploring the fourth spatial dimension. One could say that they used the speculative potential of the fourth dimension to free up the standard of how the other dimensions had been used to represent reality.

Shifting Between Dimensions

When something of a higher dimension moves into a lower dimension, it gets fragmented and becomes only partly visible. For example, if someone lives on an approximate 2D plane, like a bacterium in a Petri dish-like membrane, and if we put a needle through this 2D surface right in front of the creature, they will experience a flat, elongated barrier in front of them but would not sense the whole 3D object outside the 2D surface. If we lifted the needle and placed it somewhere else on the 2D membrane, the 2D embedded creature would simply sense it disappear and then reappear again, as if by magic. Correspondingly, when a 3D embedded creature (us) sees the 2D world of the Petri dish from above, we look inside the 2D creature, accessing something that is inaccessible for those embedded in the simpler dimension itself.

As such, movement between dimensions becomes about what can be perceivable from different dimensional perspectives, and how one can move from not seeing or accessing something to seeing more, or from experiencing something as fragmented and half hidden to suddenly perceiving it as an interconnected continuity. In this way, the methodological framework of this project is set up to explore the mechanisms of visibility and invisibility that arise from moving between different dimensional perspectives.

To further highlight the relevance of contemporary interdimensional artistic speculation, I will expand on interdimensional movement as a speculative practice in the following section.

SF - SPECULATIVE FABULATION /

SCIENCE FICTION / SCIENCE FACT

Speculation as a methodology runs throughout this project on various levels and is built into its foundational premise. The movement between dimensions is fundamentally a mathematical exercise and inherently speculative.

Considering expanded dimensionalities, or hyperspace, is also a speculative endeavour that pushes us beyond our perceptions to the edge of our cognitive scope. Mathematicians and astrophysicists conjecture on this in their theories of how the world is constituted. It is speculated upon in science fiction, through ideas like portals to parallel dimensions and hyperdrive lightspeed space travel. Furthermore, it has stimulated the formal imaginaries of the avant-garde, as well as contemporary artists exploring the fourth spatial dimension.

Definition of Speculation

When developing the methodology of interdimensional speculation, I initially define speculation as “the activity of guessing possible answers to a question without having enough information to be certain” or “to reflect, think, and ponder in an open way without drawing conclusive answers.” [1] Here, it is generative for this artistic research project that the term speculation is used in both artistic and scientific contexts. In relation to the latter, it regards the forming of “a theory or conjecture about a subject without firm evidence.” [2] In the context of speculative fiction/science fiction literature, it is engaged to indicate where cognitive activity entangles with a more imaginative activity. Here, literary writers often take the starting point of a real time, place/event, or scientifically actualised technology and then construct an imagined scenario where this starting point develops in ways that are not yet realistically viable or scientifically proven.

In the scientific tradition, speculation functions to generate theories, which are then tested experimentally against reality. The findings, in turn, help to refine and sharpen the original theories. [3] Various scientific research paradigms acknowledge an inherent relativity and transmutability concerning concepts like Reality, Truth, or Knowledge. However, overall, the methodologies they use still aim to eventually move out of the speculative towards predictability, precision, and solidification of knowledge about the real.

I have been interested in exploring how artistic research can engage the speculative as a method with a related yet different function to scientific research. To help formulate this, I have drawn on definitions of speculation from the tradition of speculative fiction/science fiction.

Speculation in Speculative Fiction

To flesh out the methodology of speculative interdimensional movement, I draw on two concepts arising from the literary analysis of speculative fiction or science fiction: "Speculative Fabulation," articulated by literary theorist Robert Sholes, and the effect of "Estrangement," articulated by writer and theorist Darko Suvin.

In their literary analysis, both Sholes and Suvin assert that we live in a cognitive age where our view of reality has been shaped by a scientific outlook, leading to specific aesthetic formations in literature that balance methodologies from science and art. I find it fitting to draw from their analysis of speculative fiction because it resonates with how the avant-garde's hyperspace speculation also progressed in the context of discoveries in the natural and human sciences. In both areas, there exists an idea that aesthetic formations will produce a cognitive critical effect related to knowledge production, distinct from science yet akin to scientific approaches.

Speculative Fabulation

In his mapping of the history of the speculative fiction genre, Robert Sholes has defined Speculative Fabulation [4] as “a fiction that offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know yet returns to confront that known world in some cognitive way.” [5] Thus, speculative fabulation derives from a believable, realistic actuality but dislocates from it by mixing didactic language with fictional imaginative constructions, in a way that indicates to the reader that perceived reality is being addressed indirectly through a fictional/imaginative device. Sholes underlines that fabulation used in this context of speculative fabulation works much the same way as in allegory, satire, fable, parable, and so on. [6] He notes that this specific fictional form has emerged in the context of the development of the western knowledge spheres since the mid-19th century and that it inherently holds attitudes and values that have shaped western science itself. The 20th-century “cosmic rearrangement…has led to new ways of understanding human time and space-time, as well as to a new sense of the relationship between human systems and the largest systems of the cosmos.” [7] As such, speculative fabulation draws on a western rationality but reflects how humanist perspectives have been decentralised, relativised across time and space, and set in re-oriented relation to invisible physical forces and entangled cybernetic systems. We are now free to speculate as widely as we can, as reality is beyond our wildest speculations anyway.

Sholes also positions his definition of speculative fabulation in a structuralist context, underlining that language shapes our perceptions of the world and that social systems and linguistic systems have similar patterns. [8] From this, he argues that “the speculative agility and imaginative freedom of words [9] has great reflexive and reflective potential to push into the same subtle fields and undiscovered areas of reality as science is prodding. Sholes argues that the main job of speculative fabulation is to expand our minds—to dream new dreams, as all dreams have truth to them. [10]

Sholes notes that speculative fabulation is neither scientific in its methods nor a replacement for actual science. Although it may be inspired by scientific concepts, it operates outside the constraints of scientific methods and practices. This is what makes speculative fabulation particularly useful for my artistic development work. It allows me to create a methodological approach that, while rigorous, is akin to a scientific method, serving more as an aesthetic tool for stimulating reflection and critical self-examination rather than for producing scientific synthesis. Additionally, by engaging with science, even in a speculative manner, the artwork can inadvertently critique how the scientific outlook—and its emphasis on cognitive and objective perspectives—affects our understanding of the world.

Sholes underlines that speculative fabulation skews or relativises the familiar through the formal shaping of the message. In speculative fiction, this involves the formal structuring of language in relation to its meaning. Sholes argues that it is fundamental for speculative fabulation to be shaped in a way that enters us into a radical openness. He describes an aspect of cognitive, interpretive processes that involves all communicative experiences, including art: “Knowing one thing is a way of not knowing something else.” [11] When something is communicated, sent as a message of signs, textures, aesthetics, to another person, they inevitably read it in the light of their own specific language, cultural context, values, etc., and almost instantaneously start transforming the message from apprehended parts to imagined gestalts. Sholes then suggests that it is the work of the author or artist to devise a way to delay this leap into familiar boxes of understanding as long as possible—to upset habitual perceptions. This state of openness is the reflective potential of speculative fabulation. The longer the reader or audience can stay in this openness, the more perceptive and open they are to really perceive and connect to a wholly different understanding of the reality they engage.

To further understand this state of openness that the speculative aesthetic formation can elicit, it has also been helpful to draw on the concept of “estrangement” developed by writer and scholar Darko Suvin.

Estrangement

In “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre” (1972), Suvin argues that the fundamental principle of science fiction is precisely this technique of defamiliarization, which elicits a radical openness in the audience, challenging their habitual perceptions. He calls this cognitive “estrangement.”

Like Sholes, Suvin points out how all literature moves along a spectrum between two opposite poles of representation. At one end is an exact recreation of the author's “empirical environment,” which Suvin calls a “zero world,” while at the opposite end is a fictional construction of an entirely different environment, referred to as a “novum.” [12] He suggests that the zero world serves as the central reference in a coordinate system. Realistic literature creates a point of the represented world very close to this zero point, whereas a fairytale creates a point of the represented world very far from it. In his analysis of speculative fiction, he describes a specific relationship between the coordinates of the “zero world” and the represented world, or “novum.” It can be a fabulation but must adhere coherently to its own inner logic—not too far from the “zero world,” yet not too close; it should be recognisable but not “neutral” either; strange enough to invite contemplation. Suvin states that this occurs in science fiction by developing the fictional world with extrapolating scientific rigour. “The effect of such factual reporting of fictions is one of confronting a set of normative systems—a Ptolemaic-type closed world picture—with a point of view or glance implying a new set of norms; in literary theory, this is known as the attitude of estrangement.” [13]

In this way, “the novum,” or, in Sholes' framework, “Speculative Fabulation,” not only serves as an allegorical reflection of our recognisable world but also becomes a transmutable or refractive world image, productive and transformative for how we experience the constitution of our known world. As such, an estrangement narrative breaks with the normal in a way that lifts the whole story out of our familiar experiential situation, making us encounter it reflectively.

Estrangement makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar, inviting a reading that balances between these positions. I will elaborate on how I engage with this more specifically later in this chapter. However, to ground this elaboration in the context of the performative installations, "making the familiar strange" involves presenting something in a recognisable mode of language that promises truth or information, such as in a lecture or panel discussion, and then making it strange by introducing an imaginary construct or fabulation into the work. Allowing the fabulation to arise performatively through didactic language, logical structuring, or site- and context-specific grounding pushes it towards the real, towards actualisation, yet never fully arriving. It is in this shifting middle ground that the work hopes to achieve the effect of estrangement.

As such, this research engages estrangement to create an openness in the viewer's relationship to the artwork that is both cognitive and creative. It invites reflection on the world that is also somehow productive, potentially contributing to change. As I outline how this effect is used as a research method in the artistic development, I will draw on estrangement but will mainly use the concept of speculative fabulation to articulate these effects.

SPECULATIVE FABULATION ENTANGLED WITH

INTERDIMENSIONAL MOVEMENT

It is because the performative installations include words and narrative that I have chosen the framework of speculative fabulation and estrangement as relevant methodological tools in the PhD project. However, as I draw on speculative fabulation in the artistic development work to reflect how the aesthetic formations are shaped, I expand beyond literary semiotics, exploring how it might also be possible to speculate through the material, spatial, and digital media of the work. In a way, I propose that text is a form of topology one can move through, and that there is a relationship between this and how one moves physically in space and orients oneself in relation to the digital. This narrative, embodied, spatial, digital way of speculating is what I attempt to articulate as speculative interdimensional movement. Or, to turn it around, I suggest that the formal exploration of dimensional movement in modernism, which I draw on and develop, can be formulated as an expanded, formal speculative fabulation. To draw my methodological map, I therefore aim to entangle speculative fabulation with interdimensional movement through the methodology of INTERDIMENSIONAL ARTISTIC SPECULATION.

In the section below, I will elaborate on how I formulate and engage with the methodology of INTERDIMENSIONAL ARTISTIC SPECULATION. After this, I will provide a more concrete elaboration of how this occurs in the specific performative installations that form the artistic results of this PhD.

OPENNESS CREATED THROUGH

SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES

I chose to formulate the methodology of interdimensional artistic speculation, recognising that actual movement between dimensions can only really be a mathematical exercise, as our reality is always experienced as spatiotemporal. Yet, this project explores how concepts affect our orientation just as much as physical movement, therefore suggesting that the mechanisms of shifting dimensions can be activated approximately and speculatively through the artistic methods.

As such, the performative installations engage formal, geometrical modulations in experiencing and sensing that point towards possibilities for physical embodiment and movement in the space of the artwork, entangled with movements in thinking and imagination. Here, there is a mind/body correlation through the experience of shifting perspectives, which stands as a prerequisite for the methodological workings of the project, through which the intermedial and interdimensional speculation occurs.

At times, this speculative interdimensional movement occurs very literally through the consideration of elements in the installation, such as 1D lines/ropes, 2D planes/projection screens, as well as space and time via movement and distance within the installations. At other times, the performative installations fold into expanded hyper-dimensions. This project suggests that this can be achieved through digital augmentation: the digital, interactive setup makes the space perform in a layered and expansive way, where it acts and moves beyond the normative limits of gravity, temporality, and spatiality. This has the effect of making participants and audiences shift between feeling materially embodied in the concrete space and feeling as if they are in a virtual, abstracted, almost internalised space. Additionally, the project proposes that the performative installation can achieve this hyperspatial folding through speculative text or narrative: here, the movement between perspectives occurs through different speculative fabulations or embodiments, suggested via narratives and concepts during the performance. For example, suggestions might include entering the linear dimension of a rope, becoming a flat shadow, or transforming into an expanded more-than-human entity.

For all these perspectives to invite reflection, it is important that the positions/embodiments oscillate and intermingle during one event. In this way, the participants/audiences are put through a prism of interdimensional viewpoints that offer coexisting experiences, all correct within their own framework but still mutually paradoxical and differentiated. As such, the performative installations are sites to explore where we cut, where we connect, where we have a virtual experience, and where we have an embodied/material experience, or maybe both at the same time. This speculative interdimensional movement is employed to foster an openness in the relationship to aesthetic experience that suspends the mechanisms of deciding what one is experiencing for as long as possible. The audience and participants can explore what happens in the shifts between perspectives, and this might highlight structures and frameworks that are normally taken for granted or seen as neutral, and so invite new ways of experiencing, reflecting, and relating.

INTERDIMENSIONAL ARTISTIC SPECULATION

The suggestion of moving away from our spatiotemporal embeddedness in the installation, either towards more simplified dimensions like the LINE or more expanded dimensions like HYPERSPACE, is already a movement towards the impossible. As such, speculation is engaged when we consider dimensions that are either more or less expanded than the third dimension in space. Both directions become a movement between the actual and the allegorical, but in different ways: dimensions less than three can be approached through simplification, illustration, or abstraction. This orientation invites analytical distance or encourages viewing objects with a certain visual distance or overview. Everything beyond three dimensions in space is paradoxical, half-hidden, contradictory, expanded, rule-breaking, and invites a form of enlarged, absorbed immersion that can encompass more, embracing complexities and contradictions. The movement from the actual towards simplified or expanded dimensional relationships is how the installations become animated, performative spaces for reflection. I will elaborate on these two directions through the contemplation of two formal dimensional shapes that have run through the PhD project: “speculating along the LINE” and “folding speculation with the HYPERCUBE.”

SPECULATING WITH THE LINE

String and rope have been important artistic and aesthetic devices throughout all the performative installations, pointing towards the linear dimension. The extended ropes and strings affect the kinaesthetic, spatial experience of the installation, stimulating the sense of physical approximations and inviting the audiences to physically experience how areas, bodies, or objects are delimited or connected. When heads turn or bodies move in relation to the rope lines, these relationships change. This can also happen in turn as the bodies stand still and the ropes and strings move or get dismantled.

When inside the rope structure, a spatial experience is elicited. Regarded from a distance, “from outside”, the ropes and strings seem flattened, as the spatial reading approaches a more distant, planar one, like an image. Here, the ropes take on a more graphical, aesthetic effect, creating linear patterns and grids that sometimes look stringent and geometrical, and sometimes complex and organic. This aesthetic might change over the course of the event in the performative installation. The rope grid might start as a more stringent cube and then get dismantled and broken down to a messier, collapsed shape in the end, for example.

One way the work engages movement between dimensions is simply through positioning the audience in relation to the ropes and strings, so that the reading shifts between these perspectives. This shift is largely about visual perception. Here, the movement is not so much about either/or, but about adjusting the amount of spatial immersion and flattening from visual distance.

The narrative components of the work also come into play here as a device to affect the perceptual and cognitive focus of the audience/participants and, in turn, entangle this with the embodied, physical focus. It is the spoken word suggestions that invite the audience to regard the ropes and strings as a LINE. This elicits a flattening of spatial awareness, focusing on a singular part of the whole experience. This, in turn, is a cognitive abstracting or simplifying movement that shifts the dimensional focus. Narrative is also applied to invite the audience to physically move and act in ways that shift their perception, such as the invitation to walk along the rope line, extend a line between oneself and others, or dismantle the outreached rope line. Here, the narrative leads to a mental or cognitive focus that entangles with the physical experience and visual orientation.

FOLDING SPECULATION WITH THE HYPERCUBE

When exploring the possibility of moving into expanded dimensionalities beyond the spatial-temporal one we are embedded in, I have been inspired by the folding hypercube, or Tesseract, shown here to the right. It is a model, or approximation, where a three-dimensional cube folds into the fourth spatial dimension. Here, it is not illustrated by lines disappearing into an invisible, expanded dimensionality but by an exterior cube folding into its interior cube and onwards, repeatedly. Here, it is applied to illustrate how the three-dimensional can move into the extra dimensional via an inner reorganisation.

Throughout the PhD, I have been interested in how it would be possible to make the performative installation into a folding hypercube to explore movement into lesser or more expanded dimensionalities in the installations.

Throughout, hyperspace has stood for a form of complex, half-hidden, half-intuitive, half-virtual, inside-outside experience. It has been a method to elicit the effect of embodied and cognitive estrangement in the audiences and participants, inviting them to hold an openness within a complex, paradoxical, or moving experience without subsuming to a simple delimitation or interpretation.

When the one-dimensional rope, as well as two-dimensional textile surfaces, are experienced together in the installation, the audiences perceive the combination as three-dimensional structures. It is these spatial installation structures that I try to fold into expanded dimensions.

More concretely, I have explored how it might be possible to move towards expanded dimensionalities by augmenting and animating the rope and textile structures via digital technology and speculative fabulation in the narrative.

In the next section of this chapter, I will provide specific examples of how digital and electronic technology enables paradoxical movements beyond normal logic or physical possibilities in each artistic result. However, one example can be outlined here: In “The Panel Discussion of Another Dimension,” interactive graphic output and light projections cover the rope/fabric structures with dots and lines, creating effects that shift between geometric stringency, organic waviness, simplicity, and complexity. This results in a layering of shifting linear, planar, and spatial readings, as well as more expanded dimensional readings, where one might lose the sense of space altogether.

MOVING INTO HYPERSPACE THROUGH SPECULATION   

Another proposed way of moving into simpler or more expanded dimensions is through narrative, speculative fabulation. For example, the narrative invites the audience or participants to interpret the installation as a specific thematic image or concept. Initially, the rope and textile structures are designed with a neutral aesthetic, where the materials do not strongly suggest a particular contextual reading, akin to line drawings or models hinting at something more developed. The installation thereby achieves an indexical openness and allegorical fluidity, allowing it to embody one projected image or suggested idea and then transition to another as the narrative evolves. In this way, the performative installations resemble mathematical models of dimensions, serving as conceptual tools to analyse dimensional entanglements and movements.

Mathematician Riemann, when articulating his hyperbolic, extra-dimensional geometry, suggested that this could help us understand the division or merging of physical forces in nature. For example, forces like electricity and magnetism can appear separate in simpler dimensions but unify into electromagnetism in higher dimensions. This allows a shift in approach: separate aspects can be unified in a higher dimension and then twisted, so that when seen again in a simpler dimension, they form new internal relationships. Similarly, in the performative installations, modalities that seem separate or distant—like “internal and external” or “lines here and dots there”—can appear distinct in one moment and unified in another, transforming the relationships between elements. Thus, narrative, digital, and physical movements can cause distinct elements to merge and then separate again into new constellations, altering the relationships between humans, materials, and meanings.

Hyperspace involves transgressing boundaries by merging, turning inside out, expanding, or stepping out of them altogether (and into parallel worlds). However, the folding hypercube also serves as a useful illustration of the necessity to define a boundary to have anything to transgress in the first place; a rule must be established before it can be broken. In literary speculative fabulation, this can be seen as the need to create a recognisable world with coherent internal rules, then skewed with elements of scientific or fantasy fabulations. In the performative installations, the narrative often follows a structural progression, starting with didactic or logical language to explain the premise of the work or flesh out the world into which the audience is invited. From there, the narrative can move beyond this initial established inner logic in various ways. The material, spatial, and concrete aspects of the installations, materialised through lines, planes, and space, also work to establish a concrete actuality, which can then be augmented and transgressed with narrative and digital speculative fabulations.

This interdimensional artistic speculation is engaged in the performative installation through the way media elements invite various perspectives and relationships. The shifting perspectives can occur overtly, moving between embodied and cognitive readings, immersed and distanced experiences. It can involve transitions between the literal and allegorical, zooming in on simplicity or expanding to grasp complexity. These movements sometimes shift, intertwine, or fold one position into another.

In the next section, I will go from a more overall methodological description to exemplify the mechanisms more concretely in the four performative installations that constitute the artistic results of this PhD project. For clearer reading, I will recommend referencing the artistic result pages while reading this part.

At the start of the PhD, I commenced development through the first performative installation, “Lethe,” which was shared with the public at Celsius Projects in Malmö, January 2020.

Physical Movement and Mental Movement

Here, I wanted to explore how physical INTERDIMENSIONAL MOVEMENT in an installation could be entangled with SPECULATIVE movements in narrative. In other words, the correlation between the audience’s position and perspectival shifts in the physical space, and how they moved between perspectives through the narrative text they listened to in an audio piece. I was especially interested in the connection between affecting an audience’s external environment at the same time as their inner experience. Thematically, I was interested in how the experience of delimitation and connection in space could link to forgetting and remembering knowledge in the mind.

This initial interest in connecting the cognitive with the embodied proved crucial to my realisation that the mind-body link was a key aspect of the interdimensional speculation in my PhD. Henceforth, it was about finding methods that engaged both physical/material and mental/imaginary perspectival shifts and investigating how they could interconnect in the various works.

The Material Installation

To develop the spatial installation, I commenced a series of tests in the studio, where I explored how string could be experienced as a LINEAR dimension in SPACE. I wanted to see how this could enhance or decrease the kinaesthetic sense of space, in a way that sometimes made the audience aware of being blocked or limited in space, and at other times invited them to perceive various points of connection in space.

The tests resulted in an installation setup with four metal wires, connected to the walls of the room at a height of 2.5 metres, forming a square grid that supported four string curtains hanging in the centre, creating a “room within a room.” At a lower level of 0.5 metres, there were four additional metal wires forming a narrower square, framing a black stool at the centre of the “string curtain room.”

From testing and participant feedback during development, I realised that it was important for the audience to physically MOVE around the installation, transitioning from one contemplation of the strings as LINEAR connectors and dividers of space to another. I also discovered that proximity was crucial. Greater distance tended to create a more visual, PLANAR reading that flattened the spatial aspects, emphasising how the strings connected. When closer and more immersed in the installation, spatial awareness was heightened, creating a sense of being slightly lost and focusing more on the string LINE as a boundary, block, or limit. (The audience literally had to step over the lower strings to engage with the installation.) This connection/division duality in the experience was not clear-cut. The readings merged in the audience’s experience, as some parts of the string installation would be closer than others at various times. After further tests and conversations with colleagues, I decided to use strings to create a PLANE—a form of wall—that could then create a SPATIAL “room within the room.” This enhancement allowed for more pronounced perspectival shifts, enabling the audience to physically reflect on the internal and the external.

In terms of colour, I wanted the installation to have a neutral aesthetic, almost reflecting a model of the white cube gallery space itself. I therefore chose white string curtains and a black stool. However, I hoped to intensify the confrontational effect of the horizontal strings as blockages, even traps; I made them red.

Shaping the Narrative

The installation invited audience interaction and movement, creating a performative element that I wanted to expand on. In parallel with the spatial and material development of the installation, I aimed to enhance its performative aspect through speculative fabulation within a suggestive narrative. I wanted to explore how this could augment the linear, planar, and spatial perceptions, moving the audience in directions and ways that were physically impossible, that were HYPERSPATIAL, so to speak.

When sitting on the stool inside the “string curtain room,” the audience would decrease their physical movement in space, yet they could continue the movement internally through narrative. I therefore hung headphones over the stool that played a sound piece consisting of a narrated monologue supported by sound effects.

The sound piece first prompted the viewer to be in the here-and-now space of the gallery. It then invited them to take a speculative dive into the ground to the river of forgetfulness, Lethe, from Greek mythology. Next, the narrative shifted to a place without forgetting, to the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden at the beginning of biblical time. Finally, it returned to the here-and-now of the gallery. In this last part, the language took the form of a guided embodiment exercise, inviting the listener to imagine the concrete space of the gallery being flooded by the water of forgetfulness from the river Lethe.

The development of the sound piece began with written text. Here, I explored how to prompt the reader to experience movement between different narrated places and temporalities. I was interested in the effect of invoking a concrete, here-and-now awareness of the space the person is actually in, and mixing this with descriptions of being in speculative fabulations of mythological spaces. The text started in the present time and continued with the same descriptive language as it narrated a descent into the ground. Since the mythological location was also narrated descriptively, in real time, it invited a form of engagement that moved towards actuality, or, in other words, suspended the experience between the actual and the imagined.

The literary point of view was also used to move the audience. First, the text engaged a second-person point of view (POV), addressing the audience directly as “you.” It then shifted to an omniscient third-person POV, describing the scenes from outside and enabling one to see all and move everywhere. Throughout these POV shifts, the real-time effect was transformed into a more mythological time and back, placing the listening audience both in the experience and as if observing from above. This formal shaping of the literary story had the effect of moving position and proximity throughout the artistic experience, allowing the audience to shift between reflecting on what they actually saw in the installation and what they were invited to imagine.

The audio piece looped at the end and started again, albeit in a slightly altered way, making the loop initially unclear. This could make the audience unsure whether they had heard it before, thus prompting the theme of remembering/linking versus forgetting/cutting. The narrative structure also embraced the loop and the return throughout the piece by repeating phrases and addressing a continual act of forgetting and remembering.

Perspectival Suspension to Trigger Reflection

This movement between the physical/actual and the imagined, between various locations, temporalities, and viewer positions, between distance and closeness, internal and external—was all engaged to invite the audience to be suspended between positions in a way that elicited something akin to the estrangement effect, and therefore invited a certain openness, experiencing “as if anew.” My aim with this development was to test how this interdimensional artistic speculation could stimulate reflection—again, here specifically on how the experience of delimitation and connection in space might be linked to forgetting and remembering knowledge in the mind.

Unresolved Aspects and Further Reflections

However, I felt that the thematic object of reflection in “Lethe” might be as much about its formal shaping and began to realise that this project was very methodologically driven. Moving forward, I wanted to better understand what specific thematic reflections I hoped the audience would have in this research and why. I also wanted to explore why it was so important for the work that the theme and the formal sculpting were aligned in this way.

Overall, the performative installation “Lethe” became a way to establish how I could engage interdimensional artistic speculation in an installation and test how to work with rope and string as the dimensions of LINE in SPACE, changing relationally through processual movement (TIME). The project was a good opportunity to explore how narrative HYPERSPATIAL speculation could stimulate freer movement in TIME and SPACE. However, I felt that I did not fully engage with how digital technology could be reflected materially in this development. Additionally, I was missing more active audience participation, especially in creating the narrative movements.

This area of development evolved into two artistic results in the PhD project: “Where are We Now? Where are We Now?” shown in Tårnsalen at the University Museum in Bergen, November 2021, and “Where are We Now? Where are We Now? Where are We Now?” shown at Gallery Entrée in Bergen, March 2022. For the final submission of the PhD, I have chosen only to include the latter work as an artistic result. However, while reflecting on the research development, it is important to include both works, as they each contribute significant developmental turning points and findings. Below, I will start sharing my reflections on “Where are We Now? Where are We Now?”, including only selected aspects important for this development, before commencing with “Where are We Now? Where are We Now? Where are We Now?”.

“Where are We Now? Where are We Now?” was initiated by an invitation to share my PhD project as part of the 2021 Bergen University Jubilee. Here, I wanted to explore how to activate the artistic methods and the mediation of my artistic research in a performative way. Since the PhD explores SPECULATIVE INTERDIMENSIONAL MOVEMENTS in text/narration as well as in space, the performative installation felt like a fitting format to explore how to shape both the textual mediation and the spatial context of that mediation. I therefore decided to develop a performative lecture about my research, taking place inside an interactive installation that could animate the presentation.

Rope Installation

Here, I continued to explore how rope could be a physical/material LINE, installed in different constellations to examine direction, connection, and delimitation in SPACE. I also continued to explore how the rope structure could function as a neutral, simplified model that various meanings could be projected onto through narrative. Hence, I chose white polyester rope that felt neutral at a distance, like a white line. I pondered how this neutral, abstracted aesthetic might allow the shifting of meanings during one event, both through shifting narrative propositions and through various embodied interactions with the ropes, as well as shifting media modulations.

For the installation, I activated the wooden 19th-century room of Tårnsalen, with a large rope grid extension that surrounded the audience and then collapsed around them during the performative lecture. At this point, I was interested in how different movements could elicit different dimensional perspectival changes, and specifically what the difference was between the INDIVIDUAL MOVEMENT of an object or person in space and the more DISTRIBUTED MOVEMENT [14] through a network—say how blood moves in a vascular system, how roots grow, or how the hypercube folds. To reflect this artistically, I explored how I, as a performing lecturer, could move around in relation to the lines of the rope grid structure to indirectly illustrate what I was lecturing on. The audience would sit inside the rope installation, and rather than moving around themselves, would experience the distributed movement of the rope grid as it eventually collapsed in on them.

Digital Technology

In this sub-project, I wanted to reflect more on “digital experience.” Initially, a prerequisite for the project had been the suggestion of a correlation between complex hyperspace geometry and the digital. Here, I wanted to investigate how a contemporary interdimensional speculation, after modernism, could be relevant exactly because it might reflect the consequences of our current digitally mediated reality, and how our subsequent sense of LINEAR, SPATIAL, TEMPORAL dimensionality is affected. In one way, the digital seems to extend our spatiotemporal capabilities and access, as if we can actually move through expanded dimensionalities. One correlation is the word HYPER used in HYPERSPACE, which also regards online digital operations, like jumping between hyperlinks. However, this promise of “access and free movement” that lies in neoliberal technological extensions of power, as well as in modernist utopias, also has various space-flattening, time-accelerating, physicality-negating effects. [15]

To reflect this artistically I sought a way for the performative installation to entangle the LINEAR across a “flat” digital screen PLANE as well as extending into the installation SPACE. Concretely exploring how digital augmentation could engage white lines as a digital “shadow” of the white rope structure. 

I then commenced to engage the open-source software Lens Studio by Snap Chat to make an interactive and augmented screen filter, a “video mirror,” through which the audience could see me and themselves. This video image was overlaid by a white moving line grid, picturing a square around a person’s head, with lines extending to the corners of the screen. This augmented video feed was then projected in the performative installation. Here, it was important that the digital lines MOVED in real-time response to me as a performer, in parallel to how the rope grid responded to physical interaction, to highlight and reflect how our physical/digital entanglements operate, to hybridise our realities.

After showing, I received feedback [16] that the augmented filter was experienced as a “mirror” extending concrete reality and a window to parallel spaces that skewed the concrete. In turn, I experienced that the medium both embodied digital expansion and the flattening effect of the screen.

The Thematic of the Performative Lecture

In terms of content, the presentation shared research on movement from the perspectives of astrophysics, politics, and biology. It presented the DIMENSIONIST MANIFESTO of Charles Tamkó Sirató, where he accounts for the dimensional expansion of avant-garde art and predicts a future cosmic art that places the audience at the centre of the artwork as a cosmos. Inspired by philosopher, theorist, and activist Franco Bifo Berardi’s critique of capitalism, I also suggested to the audience that the rope structure was “A Capitalist Corpse,” a technological, neoliberal zombie that we are buried within and have no way of imagining ourselves moving out of. I then suggested that a way out of this linear progression narrative could be to use the “distributed movement” of gravity and biological breakdown as an artistic method to collapse the contextual structure from within while I commenced to collapse the rope structure over the audience.

Findings and Further Reflections

The installation as “A Capitalist Corpse” was the first time I gave the context or the installation an individuated form as a larger being. This would later arise to become a central subject and methodology of the whole PhD project. I will turn towards this development in more detail in the chapter “Performative Installations as More-Than-Human Beings.”

This experiment of using the performative installation as a mediation tool for artistic reflection was interesting in some ways, as it allowed for a physical/spatial activation of the artistic research. However, I felt that this iteration did not strike a good balance between research mediation and artistic impact. The presentation came out too academic in its language. Feedback from the audience indicated that they sometimes lost concentration because the content felt too informative and dense. I reflected that the lack of immersion might also be due to the audience's passive physical positioning. It's interesting to note that both the role of receiving one-directional information and physically sitting stacked up in a row of chairs can be very pacifying. These reflections led to the realisation that audience agency and interaction might be important aspects of the project.

In terms of reflecting the digital, I felt that this work had put me in a very technology-pessimist position that I felt like nuancing more. Also, I felt that my reflections on digital/biological entanglements should be embedded in the artistic media development itself, not as much as an explicit critical positioning in the project.

Moving forward, I wanted to address all these considerations, which was also a deciding factor in not submitting this work as an artistic result.

WHERE ARE WE NOW? WHERE ARE WE NOW?

WHERE ARE WE NOW?

In spring 2022, I responded to an invitation to present my research in dialogue with that of PhD candidate Magnhild Øen Nordahl at her open studio exhibition at gallery Entrée in Bergen. Here, I decided to further develop the experiment from the University Museum of performatively sharing my artistic research, as well as making a performative installation.

At this point in development, I actively reflected on the folding hypercube, a formal speculation that held various repercussions for the development. Initially, I hoped that the performative installation itself would fold in a similar way to the hypercube. Here, I attempted this folding via overlapping digital augmentation, speculative fabulation in text/monologue, and physical movement/dismantling of the ropes.

Digital Augmentation and Interactivity

For the digitally folding of the rope installation, I developed a projected PowerPoint presentation that included an open source augmented "video mirror" Snapchat lens, a GIF of the rotating hypercube, and a moving 3D model of Entrée made by Magnhild. In addition, I made four videos of white moving lines that were projected on various locations in the space by moving the projector by hand during the performance. The digital components were an illustrative support for the content of the lecture; however, they also extended the linear beyond the concrete, physical space and made it interactive, animated, and augmented. I hoped that it would make the installation hover between the actual and the virtual in a way that could stimulate a form of estrangement effect.

The Narrative

For the oral presentation, I wanted to share the research that Nordahl and I had dialogued about in reading groups, mainly about ways to abstract and de-abstract and about the digital mathematisation of our surroundings. I also shared reflections on how SPECULATIVE INTERDIMENSIONAL MOVEMENT could be explored as a method to fold contexts into each other, as well as how awareness of contexts or surroundings was starting to become a central content of my research work.

When doing the last performative presentation in the University Museum, I felt that the language of mediation had been too dry and academic. I therefore commenced to make a two-part structure for this presentation: an introduction as a classically mediated lecture and a second part where I shared my methods through a SPECULATIVE FABULATION in the language structure of oral storytelling.

Here, I made an embodied storytelling session based on a written manuscript. The story is of Marie Sikveland from Bergen, who was infected by an abstraction—a condition of ocular migraine or “visual tinnitus” where she saw white lines on her retina, a fact that deeply affected how she dealt with her environment. This experience was based on part fact, part fiction but told in the performance as authentically real in the verbal mode of classical storytelling, loosely inspired by Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” (1936). While I narrated how Sikveland’s world fell apart from this visual impairment, I commenced to physically move around in and interact with the rope structure while inviting the audience to slowly unravel the ropes as well.

Bodily Movement

As I developed the work, I explored different bodily positions, gestures, and acts with the ropes that could illustrate the story in an embodied and immersive way. This mode of performing continued the exploration from previous works of how physical orientation could be linked with narrative orientation. In an indirect way, through the aesthetics, I tried to articulate a certain interplay between the internal and external, the physical and the non-physical—how the relationship between our sense organs and cognition creates a mediated reality that is both produced internally and externally. This again linked to the reflection on digital media as an actuality in the performative installations, however with a more permeable physicality.

Towards the end of the performance, I narrated Marie Sikveland’s experience of flattening out inside an expanding line and eventually becoming a space. The gallery turned dark, and my voice was enhanced through a PA system of microphone and amplified speakers. This spread the directionality of the voice, eliciting the effect of it moving from a human source to coming from all the walls in the room. I then continued to talk and share the experience of being a room and how, as a room—an embodiment of a three-dimensional context—one holds the feeling of care and commitment to be still/step back to support the content.

Further Reflections

By developing this speculative, spatial folding towards the end of the performance, I explored how to give subjective agency and voice to a larger context. This move towards focusing on the environment or room engaged a curiosity about how it might feel to be a context for someone else. I became interested in developing aesthetic ways to invite the same curiosity in an audience towards what the context they were in might have to say. Here, it became clear to me that from now on, this PhD project would not portray human individuals but would be about giving voice to larger distributed entities.

I also noticed that a strange hyperspatial folding of content and context started to happen to the whole PhD. The thematic premise of the project began to change and arise out of the formal and aesthetic structuring and reworking of the work.

Through this work/mediation of research, I feel that I found a much better balance between the artistic output and the mediating output than in the performative installation at the University Museum. Here, I received feedback from the audience that they felt more physically, emotionally, and mentally engaged. Some audience members felt “transported” during the performance, forgetting where they were, and then “coming back” with a new perspective. This description was closer to the reflective effect of the hyper-speculative folding that I wish for the artistic result to generate.

I was also happy about getting the audience more involved in the work by helping to unravel the rope structure. From reading their body language during the performance, this interaction seemed to be a part of what made them more emotionally invested, as there was literally something at stake for the moving lines in the room for them, which mirrored how the lines were at stake for Marie Sikveland in the story. From this, I became interested in how I could continue to explore INTERACTIVITY and make the audience a more invested part of the work and the research. This also aligned with how these larger environments and contexts were becoming a central theme. Going forward, the research seemed to be about articulating a more distributed perspective, including many actors, that were all part of the PhD reflection.

While discussing this development, my supervisor, Brandon Labelle, noted that I seemed to want to enter this “impossible” site, or wanting the performative installations to summon the impossible into possibility. I reflected that this might be about articulating how the dimensional spaces were speculative, on the borderline of the real, and how this might have the potential to stimulate a movement outside conventional thinking. A “what if” method that invests some level of belief. Henceforth, I tried to get clearer about articulating the speculative in the work, which eventually led me to draw on Speculative Fabulation and Estrangement.

Through engaging with Marie Sikveland’s experience, I got to embody the internalisation of dimensional abstractions (of lines, planes, and space) and reflect on how that operated in parallel to the more physical, tactile interaction with ropes as lines in the gallery space. In this way, I felt that the method of interdimensional artistic speculation worked well as a driver for this development. In line with Sholes' definition of speculative fabulation, this performative installation gave me the opportunity to explore how to balance the logically believable and the imaginary, as well as how this oscillation of perspectives invited reflections on the consequences for our reality. Here, this balancing might be better articulated as between the physical/situated and the non-physical/abstracted, and the exploration be about aesthetically engaging with the fact that psychosomatic effects, mental concepts, and digital models all influence our reality.

Through grounding the dimensional movement in an actual experience of Marie Sikveland, I also realised the importance of the work being both abstracted and situated. The right balance seems to be important for this hyper-folding to work. To understand this better, I commenced to make future works site and context specific. This became important in my choices of the identities of the larger contexts, or more-than-human beings, that the project started to give voice to. As this PhD goes on in Bergen, the larger beings started to be locally situated, in Bergen. Henceforth, the works could also be described as expanded portraits of Bergen.

In this sub-project, I continued to explore how simpler and more expanded interdimensional movements could work through the materials in the installation, the digital interactive setup, as well as in narrative, which I now planned to distribute into conversational speculation. As such, it was a continued exploration of folding the performative installation like a hypercube. However, this invitation for the audience to immerse themselves in folding expanded perspectives was now about exploring how to give body and voice to larger environments or contexts. Here, I was interested in exploring how to fold the bodies of human performers out to fill a whole room, while simultaneously folding a larger environment or context into the mind of a human performer. In this way, I aimed to examine how performative installations themselves would, in fact, become new materialist agents, or, as I finally termed them, “more-than-human beings.” Thus, it was becoming clearer that the objective of the project was to reflect in a more distributed and expanded way: to contemplate our intricate relationship with our environment, which is both digital and physical, tangible and invisible.

For the mediation of how I have conducted the methodical development in this sub-project, I cover the engagement of interdimensional speculation here but go in depth with the more participatory, group-related aspects in the next chapter, “Performative Installations as More-Than-Human Beings.”

Distributed Conversation Through Live Action Roleplay

To explore this expanded, interdimensional perspective in narrative, I then began to see how narrative speculation could become more distributed and interactive. So far, it had taken the form of a scripted monologue delivered by me as a single performer. As the perspective expanded, it became interesting to explore how the narrative could emerge from a whole group that was part of and constituted the work, more like an improvised conversation.

Here, I decided to research live action role play (LARP) as a method to see if this was a way to make the speculations more embodied, relational, and conversation based. Since the tradition of LARP is about people coming together to play out the roles of fantasy figures in a real-life, immersive Gameworld, there might be methods to borrow from that could be set up in an artistic performative installation.

To start understanding these methods, I commenced to take part in many LARPs, initially online because of COVID-19, and then in real life. I have mentioned examples of this in the chapter “Conversations With the Field.” I also studied how to write LARP scripts and rule frameworks for games, and I studied the role of the “gamemaster,” who normally sets up the narrative framework for the game and the world but keeps the potential actions in this world open to the participants.

Hypersubject Conversations: A Method of Conversational Speculation

In small test groups of self-initiated LARPs, I commenced to experiment with how to open the narrative “control” of the lecture format into the conversational format of the panel discussion. I was curious to see how this offered relational and improvisational potential, which might align with the entangled and interdimensional premise of the project.

I then began to develop my own method for conversational roleplay speculation based on these LARP methods, with the aim of giving cybernetic, more-than-human networks subjective agency and voice. For this work, I coined a working concept: a hypersubject, by which I meant a larger network or context, a more-than-human entity, acting as a subject (with perspective, agency, and emotions). It could be a physical place (lake, park, mountain), an institution, a social or digital network, or a more abstract entity like the economy or the climate. I then invited test participants into the project to speculatively and playfully embody these hypersubjects and engage in conversation as if they were these larger beings: a form of embodied, improvised SPECULATIVE FABULATION.

The play sessions commenced like traditional LARPs: through the stages of preparation / WORKSHOPPING, actual PLAY, and then DEBRIEF. First, I invited participants, initially artist colleagues, to choose a role of an institution/environment they were already a part of or had a relationship with. They gave the hypersubject a name and decided on the pronouns of “I” or “we.” Through workshopping, the participants then “mapped” the body and personality of the chosen hypersubject, following a template I had prepared. After this, I would bring the participants through a relaxation exercise to stimulate a more embodied, associative, and open way of perceiving. Then the roleplay would commence. The actual play was set up as an interview or a panel discussion. Here, I would play the interviewer or moderator, and I would always invite two or more hypersubjects at a time, so they could talk with each other as well as with me.

These earlier role-play experiments were driven by a genuine interest in the perspectives that would arise and a curiosity to see if this could be a way to make us humans relate empathetically in a more expanded and distributed way. If this could be a method to express part visible agencies and feelings that might lie both inside and outside us. The idea was to eventually set the game up as a public panel discussion between these larger beings, where I would maintain the role of the moderator.

Digital Interactivity

At the same time, I started developing ways to give these larger more-than-human beings a possible material manifestation in the performative installation. I thought that this could be through tactile materials of rope and textile screens, and through projected digital video graphics, LED light, and amplified sound that responded interactively to humans playing the roles of the larger beings, and so extend their movements and utterings to fill the whole installation.

As I started working with groups, the aim was to keep exploring how digital interactivity and augmentation could give the installations a performative expression in real time and make responsive circuits with the humans. I also wanted to keep exploring how digitally computational movements could stretch the installations beyond normative limits of temporality, layering, malleability, and spatiality that the physical otherwise has to abide by. As such, the development of digital, interactive augmentation could remain a form of digital SPECULATION FABULATION or an investigation into how to possibly move into HYPERSPACE.

While commencing development, I decided to abandon the Snapchat lenses, as I did not want to reflect the commercial implications of using a social media app. Additionally, I wanted the opportunity to work in a more customised way that could allow more tailored solutions that fitted the emerging forms of the artistic works. I also felt that this would align the technological development better as artistic research.

Kinect/VVVV/Projection

Hence, I started to develop a customised sensor/programming/video/light/sound setup, together with creative technologist Luca Biada. Here, we decided to explore the Kinect 02 sensor. It is originally produced for the Microsoft Xbox games but was discontinued in 2015, and it is possible to hook up to other systems for independent development. The sensor includes an RGB camera, infrared detectors that map depth, a microphone array, and software/algorithms that can translate a person into “skeleton points.” Combined, these sensors can map a person’s contours, movement, position, voice, and facial expressions. Because the Kinect includes many sensors in one, it made for an artistic development tool that allowed us to experiment in various directions. Selected inputs from the sensor were fed to a visual programming language, VVVV. This platform was then used to generate graphical movements and sound/light modulations, which were then output to video projectors, LED lamps, and speakers. We chose VVVV specifically because it has very powerful features for generating and modulating visual graphic outputs.

For the input to the Kinect, I decided that we would focus on the upper body of a seated human while speaking and articulating: their arm gestures, their head movement, their voice, as well as the depth of their position when they moved back and forth on a chair. This was to reflect a seated, articulating person, and inadvertently comment on the rational, cognitive bias of a panel discussion, which often emphasises the thinking human and “cuts off” the rest of the body.

Through early Kinect/VVVV development, the focus was on generating output resting in between body representations and background field representations, so that it was just as much a space as an entity that was visualised. Another focus was scale: that a subtle human movement and utterance would have a large effect in the images/light/sound output. A third focus was to balance the effects of the human movements with randomised or generative growth patterns generated by the programming language in VVVV. This contributed to an augmented output that was grounded in the real-life action in concrete space but also had a computational “life of its own.” As such, the movement/agency came just as much from the digital technology as from the human performers in the room. The aim was for an output that decentralised the human subjects in the room and expanded the sense of agency and performativity to the whole installation itself. As such, the augmented visuals became a way to amplify the roleplaying talking humans so that it felt like the whole room was the one articulating.

The Material Installation

The installation was planned to contain textile screens, sometimes as planar architectural divisions in space, and sometimes as neutral backgrounds to be animated/augmented with the interactive projections and light. Early on, it became clear that the positions of the screens were important for the immersive effect of the work. As mentioned, I hoped that the audience would feel like they were sitting inside the larger, more-than-human beings as they spoke and articulated, not as if watching something on a “cinema screen.” During development, I first made a setup with three screens in an open cube shape, surrounding the participants who played the roles of the larger beings. However, this had the effect of the humans sitting as if “on a stage,” with the projections as scenography behind. I wanted to decentralise the human subject more and let the more-than-human beings have a bigger focus. I tried letting the humans perform from another room and send the visuals into the actual exhibition space. But I abandoned this idea because it did not seem clear that the digital effects were an interactive response to a live performance. The real-time effect somehow reinforced an actuality and presence that was needed to ground the speculative suggestion of the larger more-than-human beings. It rather seemed to be a matter of adjusting the level of focus between the human and more-than-human presence. In the end, I designed a screen setup for three channels, as a broken-up cube, with hanging semi-transparent polyester voile textiles that would both hold the projected images as well as allow the projections and humans to be seen through the screens. In this way, the humans could be sensed but not centre stage. This design also broke up the linear perspective aspect of the installation, as now there was no optimal point to experience the work from. The audience could sit at different locations in the installation and get varied perspectives/experiences of the work.

I realised that, in a similar way to the earlier white rope structures, this installation had a neutral look, like a simplified model or empty canvas, that could then be filled with shifting projections and various speculative fabulations of the role players. The initial neutrality was shown in the choice of white polyester voile fabric as PLANES in the installation, and black rope and cables as LINES in the installation. Also, the textile structure still emulated a cube, as if being a dimensional model or simplification, however broken up.

The Participants

I then commenced to test the “hypersubject conversation” LARPs in the Kinect/VVVV/projector setups at different workshops at the Art Academy in Bergen. Groups of participants would take part, choose roles from a context they were familiar with, play the roles, test the setup, and give feedback on how they thought it worked. Here, I initially invited art students and then eventually started mixing the groups, including students with an extra interest in the methodology and media approach, as well as theatre students and professional artists and scholars. Generally, these participants were already familiar with performance art or performing in theatre and/or engagement with public speaking or public discursive activities. These series of workshops were a great way to see how the roles of the more-than-human beings developed and what themes started to emerge from the conversations. I will elaborate on this group work and what arose in the larger perspectives in the next chapter “Performative Installations as More-Than-Human-Beings”.

Site and Context Specificity

During this development, I realised that it was important to make a choice about which specific more-than-human beings would be activated. From the previous sub-project, I had found that it was important to situate the speculative fabulations both site- and context-specific to balance the actual and the imaginary, the concrete and the abstracted. Here, I was drawing on Sholes' description of how speculative fabulations needed to balance between a coherent or “realistic” world and an imaginary element, and that this balance was what made the work strange and opened the audience to reflection.

In the workshops, I had found that when the larger beings were more situated, it helped the immersion of the roleplaying participants to generate engaged reflections and utterings. This would then make the arising reflections relevant for the project as well as for the audiences experiencing the panel discussion. I therefore chose to continue to work with two specific more-than-human beings: “The Art Academy in Bergen” and “Store Lungegårdsvannet,” a lake close to the Art Academy building in the area of Møllendal. I also chose that the final work would be made for and shown in the Art Academy gallery, Room 61. In this way, the audiences would literally sit inside the more-than-human bodies as they shared their perspective.

I also commenced to develop a more context-specific language framework for the roleplay as a panel discussion. I would perform as the moderator of the panel discussion and experimented with how to introduce it. My first strategy was to create a larger fictive world for the more-than-human beings, which I would describe for everyone at the beginning of a session. However, in the end, I found that Bergen, the area of Møllendal, and the Art Academy—as the actual context the audience was already in—were the specific world for the panel discussion. I therefore finally introduced the experience, now titled “The Panel Discussion of Another Dimension,” and the panellists exactly as they were—with academic, informative language, as one would in a panel discussion where the context is implied by the ritualised academic form itself. By grounding the experience in the context of a conventional panel discussion in this way, the speculative premise of the work and the subsequent utterances of the more-than-human beings were granted more actuality.

Further Development of Digital Interaction

As the early developing workshops transitioned into public panel discussions, I continued to develop the installation and the Kinect/VVVV/projector/light setup. The aim was to optimise the audience's experience of the gallery room at the Art Academy, 'Room 61,' to be perceived as a larger, articulating, more-than-human being. The setup was now developed so that when one performer spoke as one of the larger beings, one set of graphics and lights would fill the room. When another performer then spoke in their role, another set of outputs would be activated. This created the effect of the more-than-human beings swapping places or taking over the room as their body every time each of them spoke.

These overall effects of the digital setup were still supported by a formal, dimensional interplay in the graphics. During development, various graphic aesthetics were explored. As the work evolved, the output finally turned out as projected graphics of floating white dots that moved with the articulating body of the roleplaying performer and turned into white lines when the performer spoke. This “dot/line” setup was the main output for the role of the “Art Academy.” Blue LED lights were the main output for “Store Lungegårdsvannet” and faded in every time the performer playing that role spoke. I had also kept a VVVV visual that was based on computationally generated waveforms activated by the voices of the performers and emanated from their mirrored profiles in the video images. This “water” output was used in the final stages as a filter that could be merged or faded into the “dot/line” setup at times when the presence of the lake “Store Lungegårdsvannet” was stronger. An additional effect that showed a change between the two roles speaking was swapping between positive and negative in the projected videos.

The decision on digital graphics and lights was about showing various dimensional visuals, almost as digital versions of the white rope structures from previous installations. Overall, the aesthetic choice was made because I felt it reflected INTERDIMENSIONAL movement most interestingly: when only the dots were projected, the room became quite dark, and the spatial effect for the audience was of floating more freely in an installation without boundaries and clear architectural features. When the lines arrived, various one-dimensional directions were introduced, and the installation seemed more defined. The added light also made it possible to see more of the space through the textile screens. When the “wave” effect faded in, the two-dimensionality of the projection screens and walls was accentuated and supported the sense of delimiting the space into overlapping planes. Overall, this setup gave the possibility to change the sense of the installation very dramatically and rapidly, and therefore move the audience between shifting dimensional experiences during the performance. The decision on these aesthetics was also an attempt to suspend the audience between perspectival positions in a more overt way, like that of balancing between being a body yet a space, or between the illustrative (blue light for water, overlapping lines for institutional networks) and the abstract.

Lines of Rope and Cables

In the developing workshops, I began attaching people with ropes as connecting LINES in ways that had various research focuses. One aspect involved the continual exploration of how different connecting forms would stimulate the sensation of being physically affected by each other in the pulling and moving of rope. Here, I was interested in the effect of being intimately, physically linked in the immediacy of the movement while still spatially distant.

I conducted tests to further explore how people could become physically entangled together and how the rope connection could serve to merge individual awareness closer to group awareness. I saw this as a physical and literal way to reflect that they collectively made up the larger environment beings. Here, I kept vigilant to perceive how this physical connection and altered bodily sense would affect their performance, how a sense of unity might arise among the participating performers, helping them feel more trusting and open to playing their expanded roles. More concretely, this was explored through experiments with various forms of rope connection: circular formations, leaning into the rope, creating a complex net, and a moving wheel formation where the ropes functioned as spokes. Overall, the workshop participants gave feedback that they experienced a heightened sense of group cohesion from these exercises. I reflected that this approach fitted the cybernetic theme of interconnection in the work and was a literal and non-conceptual way to engage these reflections with the participants. In the final public performances, the role players were not connected with ropes, but I chose to connect the audiences with each other and with the installation as one big cybernetic body.

In the last stretch of development, the cables in the installation took on an important aesthetic role. Due to the heavily technological nature of the work, numerous cables connected various equipment in the installation. These included power cables providing electricity (which also emerged as a character within the work), as well as HDMI, DMX, and XLR cables for connecting all the devices. Rather than concealing these masses of cables, I decided to make them into a prominent feature that supported the theme of the interconnected, more-than-human body. This choice also made me interested in leaning towards a slightly more organic aesthetic. I therefore arranged the electrical cables to descend from the ceiling, resembling a main artery or upside-down tree. From there, all the cables flowed outwards to the equipment in organic, branching, river-like patterns on the floor. I then added black ropes to the "cable tree" extending from the ceiling, which the audience was invited to hold while I described to them how every element within this larger body was now physically connected.

Overall, many interesting artistic, media-based reflections regarding ropes and cables as physical connecting lines arose in this sub-project. However, I found that this aspect was still not fully realised here. One issue that emerged from these experiments was that participants and the audience sometimes reported that they would forget about the ropes and become very passive physically as they immersed themselves imaginatively. I felt that the right balance was not achieved. However, I decided to pursue this development further in the next sub-project “Pulling the Earth Strings.” Here, I was interested in how the rope LINES could be animated in a way that made them more physically present for the audiences. In this way, I aimed to find a better balance between the embodied/situated and the conceptual/speculative stimuli, as well as allowing a more nuanced relationship between individual and collective experiences to oscillate within these connective webs.

Findings and Further Reflections

The digital augmented nature of the spaces, as well as the speculative nature of the narrative articulations, had the effect of folding the perspectival positions into each other in the experience: the virtual and the material; the internal and external; the distant and the immersive. The overall feedback and reaction from workshop participants and audiences was that this balance between the actual and the imaginary allowed for moments of reflection to arise in them. I will talk more about how I invited and engaged this group feedback to push development forward in the next chapter, “Performative Installations as More-Than-Human Beings.”

However, here I will highlight a realisation that “The Panel Discussion of Another Dimension” held an interesting paradox: in trying to decentralise the human perspective through the human empathetic, speculative embodiment of the more-than-human, the project might also inflate the human subject and make a totally anthropocentric work. Since it was humans that gave voice to the larger perspectives, there was a lot of human speaking, with the inherent tendency to create meaning delimitations out of everything. This aspect might be exactly how humans other or negate more expanded agential modulations and voices in the first place.

However, I also realised that this project might be about exploring anthropomorphism by using it as a generative method. Here, it might not be about channelling a real animate entity, but about exploring what happens as speculative fabulation pushes art towards science and makes the imaginary intermingle with the actual (or ideas of truth). The real question might be if this border space could offer an opportunity to sensitise human participants and audiences to be more attentive and listening to new perspectives and voices, irrespective of whether they come from without or from within.

In this, I also realised that the ongoing development or research might be about attuning the balance of the media elements to see what happened to the effects of the border space. I decided that for the next project I would do in Lydgalleriet, “Pulling the Earth Strings,” I would give the human narrative voice another role in the project and make space for material and media-based utterings of the installation itself, beyond human language, as voices of the more-than-human.

At this stage of development, all the performative installations in the PhD would arise as articulating more-than-human beings. Now, it was also clear that this happened through the methodology of INTERDIMENSIONAL ARTISTIC SPECULATION, using the mediums of space/installation, digital/electronic technology, and text/narration.

Moving onwards, I hoped to develop some directions that the previous sub-project had not fully afforded. One aspect was about lessening human language as the primary agency of the larger, environment beings and engaging the material textures and technological modulations as more prominent articulating features.

The Rope as a Line

In terms of the dimensional, I wanted to further explore the rope as a LINE. Were there still other ways that the rope lines could be animated, and in turn augment the spatial quality of the installations? This had been a focus since the first project “Lethe”, and now I was interested in continuing to investigate what had arisen when connecting humans via ropes during “The Panel Discussion of Another Dimension”. Specifically, the rope as a physical form of cybernetic entanglement, and how this might morph the sense of relationality, distance, proximity/intimacy, and spatiality for an audience. Here, I also wanted to address the problem from “The Panel Discussion of Another Dimension” where the participants reported sometimes forgetting about the ropes as they immersed themselves imaginatively. I was interested in how the ropes could be animated to become more physically present for the audiences and possibly find a better balance between physically situated stimuli and conceptual, speculative stimuli.

Additionally, I was curious about the possibility of folding the LINEAR dimension inward altogether through inviting the audiences to move into the line as an independent SPACE in itself. Here, a related research question arose: How can it be possible to move the whole artistic experience into the LINEAR dimension of the rope? Now, that is, of course, a rather paradoxical suggestion; a speculative movement that might just as well be articulated as an imploding fold into hyperspace.

Hyperspace Portals

While pondering how this hyperspatial movement could be achieved, I looked more closely at dimensional transitions again. Specifically, how movement from one dimension to another can happen through transitional pathways or "portals" of higher dimensions. This trope is often used in classical speculative fiction literature,where the portal is hyperspatial: that is, a zone where opposing sizes like time/space, up/down, internal/external, near/far are intermingling, freed from conventional relationships or directions. This allows for freer movement inside the portal, and thus the opportunity to exit in a very different dimension than one entered. When coming out on the other side of the portal, one then arrives at a parallel world that has a more fixed set of internal rules again, even though they might deviate from conventional reality to varying degrees.

The Performative Installation as a Portal to Enter the “Nordnes Earth Being”

For this sub-project, I was interested in exploring how this hyperspatial portal could be achieved through a mixture of speculative narrative and digital, electronic technology. I wanted the parallel dimension/world that the audience would be invited to move into to be the underground beneath the peninsula area of Nordnes in Bergen. Additionally, I intended for this underground space to not only be a parallel dimension but also a more-than-human being. I hoped that the performative installation would function as a portal, taking audiences on a physical and speculative journey underground to meet this SPECULATIVE FABULATION: the “Nordnes Earth Being.”

To ground this development site-specifically, I approached Lydgalleriet in Bergen, located in Nordnes, and was fortunate they were interested in hosting it as the site for the work. My intention was to create a performative installation that would be experienced as a durational, participatory event, where the audience could be invited on a journey into the ground beneath Lydgalleriet, to encounter the larger being and communicate with it.

I planned to use INTERDIMENSIONAL SPECULATION through narrative and digital electronics as a way to transform Lydgalleriet into an enveloping, interactive, transformative, and performative installation that would take the form of the Nordnes Earth being. I aimed for the installation to represent the more-than-human being as a "root network" of vibrating and sound-resonating ropes, which the audience could enter, connect to, and become part of. The speculative narrative could then form the framework for the experience of the installation, with the visual form and tactile vibration function of the rope network changing during the event.

The initial idea was that a sound-activated narrator's voice would lead the speculative premise of the work. This descriptive monologue would invite the audience on a journey into the interior of the earth, through a network of underground caves located in the Bergen area of Nordnes below the gallery, to meet this larger being deep down and talk to the being through sound vibrations and pressure sensors in the ropes. This, in turn, was meant to invite the audience to touch the ropes and trigger interactive functions that affected both the vibrating installation and each other. The hope was that this might lead to the group experiencing a closer connection and, in turn, the sensation of transforming into this earth creature themselves.

Rope Line Function

To follow the methodological aim of engaging the rope as a LINE that could then move into other dimensionalities, I wanted the rope structure to fill the whole gallery and transform between being a context/site and a content/being. The idea was for the audience to move through the installation during the event, from one stage in the journey to the next. As such, the ropes of the installation would change functions during a live event. In the beginning, the rope would form a window/portal or a transition line that needed to be transgressed to enter the speculative journey. Then the rope would take the function of a connecting line to move along into the earth. Eventually, the ropes would coalesce into a spatial structure: the actual body of the “Nordnes Earth Being” that the audience could enter and listen to. Throughout, these different rope forms would change the function of how lines operated in space, and therefore also change the perspectives of the audience, or one could say, the relationships that the audience would engage in. In this way, changing MOVEMENT, both through the line structure (individual movement) and as vibrations in the line structure (distributed movement), would create these transitional spaces or portals to enter new constellations or parallel worlds.

This movement through the installation could also be reflected as a movement from more visual distance that engaged a classical linear perspective, and towards spatial, sonic, and haptic immersion, in a way that could be understood as collapsing the visual distance. This movement from the visual to the tactile could also be articulated as a movement between external and internal experience, or as yet another way to fold the installation as a hypercube. This folding might be almost like an embrace, mirrored in the invitation to fold into or enter the Nordnes Being. This might also contain an invitation to become distributed or part of a larger body.

The Material Aesthetics of the Rope Installation

In earlier sub-projects, the rope had been a generic, white polyester to give the rope structure a more neutral, “model-like” look that could then take on shifting conceptual and digital projections. In this development, I wanted to give the rope structure a less neutral look and let the materiality and colour have more specific personality, voice, and presence. During development, I tested many different types of rope texture and colour. Feedback from test audiences and participants was that they engaged more with the rope structure as an earth being when it had a more organic and textured aesthetic. I therefore landed on the choice of hemp-coloured ropes that were assembled in a more organic, complex weave, alluding to body tissue or a root network. The woven surfaces, or planes, were thought of as “nodes” in the tissue network, or fragmented garment shapes that could invite a human body to enter and engage.

Overall, the rope structure remained abstract enough to allow the performative meanings of the installation to oscillate and transform. If I had wanted to fully flesh out the more-than-human being, I might have made it more illustrative with skin and eyes. By maintaining a rope grid structure, the installation retained an open meaning, inviting the audience to be aware of how their relationships to it shifted. As artistic research, it was important that the work was less representational and more performative, as I maintained that it was in this relationship with the audience that new reflections could arise.

Vibrations / Sounds

physically present for the audiences. Thus, finding a better balance between the physically situated stimuli and the conceptual and speculative stimuli.

I was interested in exploring how the ropes could quite literally be felt to vibrate. To develop this, I first put small vibration motors [17] on ropes to sense how that would feel. Very soon, I realised that this haptic output worked well and had an auditory side effect. Sound is just vibrations through a medium, normally air. But here you could hear the vibrations travelling through the material medium of the rope as you put your ear to it. Together with sound engineer and producer Erik Medeiros, I explored how to change the intensity and pitch of the motors, and I realised that transducers [18] playing prerecorded or digitally generated sounds gave a similar effect of vibration that could then be modulated endlessly as a sound medium. In further development with technical engineer Sindre Sørensen, we used the visual programming language Max/MSP and the electronic prototyping platform Arduino to create the connections between motors/transducers and rope. Here, a unique setup emerged where the transducers attached to the rope transferred voices/sound effects/vibrations into the rope, so you could feel it with your hands/body and hear it if you put your ear to the rope. The vibration motors were now integrated into the playback via Max/MSP to play in sync with the oscillating patterns of the sound. As such, the motors had a type of subwoofer effect, boosting the sound output from the oscillators. However, this also contributed a strange “parallel dimension” of visceral, crunchy, or almost “creature-like” tones playing alongside the oscillator sounds.

To enhance the effect of a conversation with the larger being, I also wanted the sound/vibration to have some level of interactivity. Sindre and I therefore developed a setup where movement and touch feedback registered by contact mics [19] were programmed in Max/MSP to trigger specific sound samples and motor vibrations. This was meant to elicit the effect of transforming the installation into a large, communal string instrument.

In parallel, I continued to develop sounds for the material utterings of the larger beings. I found that field recordings of water, rock, and wind were fitting to make this environment being come alive. However, to problematise the nature/culture divide, I wanted an aesthetic in the sound that was both “authentic” and (digitally) manipulated. With technical help from Medeiros, I therefore continued to rework the sounds digitally. We equalised/calibrated the sound frequencies in ways that optimised the presence and vibration in the rope. We also applied effects to make the environmental sounds rhythmical, almost like speech or music. In addition, the effect of reverb became important, as it gives space to the sound. By giving the field recordings more space, it would sound like being in a cave. Test audiences reported that this contributed to an interesting effect of dimensional shifting: by hearing a large cave inside a thin rope, it felt like being suspended between relating to the very concrete touch of a line while also being inside an invisible large space. I reflected that this might be a way to engage the earlier question of how to “fold the whole artistic experience into the LINEAR dimension of the rope.”

The Voice of the Larger Being

The process of animating the performative installation to become an expressive, more-than-human entity raised an increasingly pressing question: did these multidimensional beings even need a human-like, language-based subjectivity to articulate themselves? In "The Panel Discussion of Another Dimension," the human voice played a central role in giving the larger beings a voice, while digital media served to extend this agency into the space. In this sub-project, I decided to explore another balance between human language and material/technological utterings. Here, the text-based narrative was sound recordings of monologues, presented on stereo speakers at the beginning of the performance. The main function of this narrative was to invite the participants to enter the speculative premise of a journey into the ground under the gallery and to present the rope structure as a SPECULATIVE FABULATION; a more-than-human being; the Earth Being of Nordnes. The actual interactive dialogue with the earth being would happen through engaging the materiality of the installation, the haptic vibrations, and sounds in the rope.

The Narrative Structure

As such, the narrative directed the transformative function of the performative installation, giving it a form of hyperspatial portal function, where the reading was freed to move in ways it could not physically do.

The introductory monologue was based on a written manuscript. During development, I explored how to begin it like an informative embodiment exercise, grounding the listener in both the specific situation and the site of Lydgalleriet/Nordnes by drawing on its architectural, natural, and historical characteristics. I then examined how the narrative could gradually weave speculative suggestions into the otherwise direct and informative text, shifting the real-time address to other locations (such as into the ground) and temporalities (like geological deep time). This literary progression aimed to take the audience on a journey underground, building anticipation for encountering the earth being.

Drawing on methods of estrangement and speculative fabulation, the text deliberately tried to balance a factual, informative tone with a more imaginative and poetic one. This approach was designed to create specific expectations in the audience, guiding their perspectives in a way that could invite a particular type of immersion. By making the familiar seem strange, I hoped to invite the audience into a more open mindset, suspending habitual judgments. The goal was to create conditions for engaging in the haptic and auditory experience at the event’s conclusion, moving the imaginative toward the actual, and thus inviting the audience to explore the invisible or unknown, while listening for something that might otherwise remain unarticulated.

Site Specificity at Lydgalleriet and Nordnes

For the speculative fabulation to work, it must balance between actual worldbuilding and imaginative worldbuilding. Throughout the PhD development, this balance has often involved being actual and literal on the one hand: for example, grounding people in the here and now of the material, aesthetic experience in the gallery, addressing things that would normally be meant allegorically as if they were very literal/real, and grounding the work site-specifically so that it is a portrait of the exact location, space, and context. This is then augmented by the speculative fabulation, which transforms the actual, the literal, and the site-specific, moving it into an openness of becoming. In this balance, the situated aspect grounds the work, making it relevant for the audience, while the estrangement introduces a distance to what they already know, in a way that can invite reflection. Another way to articulate this is that this balance gives the work a type of "authentic" flavour that helps the audience engage with the setup, thereby seducing them into immersion in the speculative fabulation, which then animates it and moves it towards reality.

I will get into more specific reflections arising from this work, as well as specific articulations arising from the Earth Being of Nordnes, in the chapter “Performative Installations as More-Than-Human Beings”.

Development in Lydgalleriet

During development, the work was set up as a full-scale sketch installation in Lydgalleriet. This setup was then tested by participants to see how it worked architecturally, interactively, sonically, and haptically/vibrationally. I go more into how I engage group feedback as part of the artistic research in the chapter “Performative Installations as More-Than-Human Beings.” However, here I highlight how this expanded conversation helped me fine-tune a series of aspects that made the work more site- and context-specific for the audiences.

I realised that there were water tubes and air ventilation pipes in the ceiling of Lydgalleriet that gave a specific sound profile to the space. I decided to integrate this into the narrative of the piece. Here, the pre-recorded monologues would point to the pipes of moving water and air in the space and then speculatively suggest a movement into the ground through these pipes. Recorded sound of the actual water and air was also included in the playback as sound design. This was with the aim of eliciting a strange effect of the actual and augmented sounds intermingling in the space.

I realised that the invitation to move through the gallery from one area of function to the next was a bit like moving through levels in a game. In this way, I could see that my study of the interactive engagement in Live Action Role Play mechanics still influenced my development. I was embracing this aspect and started to draw from game design again. Specifically, I looked at how the initial stage of “onboarding” functions in a VR game to make the players familiar with operating the digital interface. This could help me find a way to give the audiences instructions on how to interact with the installation, but in a way that was integrated into the experience itself. One solution would be to have in-game performers working as “tour guides” for the audience during the event.

Light and Shadows

To give the feel of walking into the underground, the whole gallery would be blacked out and artificially lit. Here, this was mainly as a supportive function for the narrative and aesthetic quality of the installation. However, I was also interested in exploring how artificial light could animate the performative role of the installation. I therefore decided that the light would be connected to the Max/MSP patch so that the light intensity could oscillate in rhythm with the sounds. I also realised that the light in itself could support the interdimensional speculation. As the light source rose and moved inside the rope tissue of the larger being, it would cast moving shadows on the walls of the gallery. These shadows would have the effect of projecting the three-dimensional being down onto the two-dimensional plane of the walls, a trope of shadowing that was very familiar from Bragdon’s overview of interdimensional movement. I felt this shift in perspective might reverse the internal absorption experienced during the tactile immersion in the ropes' haptics and sounds by projecting awareness outward and inviting the audience to be aware of the surrounding space again. A last utterance in the ever-evolving interdimensional folding game of the PhD.