Third Space: An interactive exploration of mixed realities

Abstract

Living in my hometown Tehran, Iran, and moving to an entirely new city, Calgary, Canada, helped me realize the relationship between my body, cultural/physical space, and place (context) more vividly. Experiencing physical/cultural dislocation, living in in-between spaces (real/virtual), and moving through the process of reformation of identity in the new environment has led me to conduct this research-creation. In this research, I investigate how bodies perceive physical/social spaces, how the context (place) shapes this perception, and how Augmented reality-as a digital interactive technology- helps study, embody, and share the experience of displacement through an interactive play between the artist and users. Adopting newer interdisciplinary approaches for the structure of art practices brings former perspectives to a more contemporary level. I use research-creation as the main methodology and augmented reality as the primary method to analyze the factors of the context and the embodied experiences. In the following chapters, I discuss theoretical frameworks that define the relationship between body, space, and place in displacement. Further, I study the mixed environments and new supporting technologies such as Augmented Reality as a suitable platform for this research and present my own artwork, “Floating Bodies A.R. App” as an example to answer my central research question: How can the use of augmented reality help us attend to the embodied experience of displacement?