Virtually Sensuous (Geographies): Towards a Strategy for Archiving Multi-user Experiential and Participatory Installations

This paper explores potential strategies for the audio-visual documentation of a multi-user choreographic digital installation entitled Sensuous Geographies using VR technologies. The installation was interactive, fully immersive and participatory, with the general public initiating the details of the installation’s sonic and visual worlds. At the time of the making of Sensuous Geographies, the means of documenting participatory installations in action was limited to video documentation and photographs, which represent a third-person perspective. This article suggests that new forms of technology provide an opportunity to archive interactive choreographic installations in such a way that the choreographic forms and embodied experience they generate can be re-presented in audiovisual form to historians and audiences of the future. This article expands on a conference presentation of the same title given at the DocPerform2 Symposium, City University. London in November 2017