Queering the Default Body ()
I was briefly employed by the University of Bonn to work on a small artistic research project within the interdisciplinary project InVirtuo4.0 . InVirtuo is all about avatars, virtual representation of the self and new possibilies in VR and the metaverse for therapy and other neuro-sciencey things.
Part of the fun are two full body photogrammetry scanners in Dortmund and Bonn, which I got to scan myself in! For science! The Dortmund one even features a fully automated pipeline from scanner to fully rigged avatar in only a couple of minutes. Very cool!
For our project we interviewed two groups of experts, one queer performance artists, the other wheelchair users, on the whole avatar and scanning situation, its accessibilty and barriers. We recorded the interviews and generated a whole bunch of output and recommendations for the larger project and even presented at the GfM in Paderborn as part of a VR panel.
There might even be a proper academic article at some point. But who knows, academic research works in mysterious ways.
I however got to put the avatars and the recordings back into VR as type of interactive documentation of all the work. I used Godot and build it for the Meta Quest 3(s). The code for this is unfortunately not public, but might become so if/when the article is published.