My research partakes in an expanded documentary practice that weaves together walking, immersive technologies, and moving image. Two lines of enquiry motivate the research journey: the first responds to the trope of VR as 'empathy-machine' (Milk, 2015), often accompanied by the expression 'walking in someone else's shoes'. Within a research project that begins on foot, the idiom’s significance demands investigation. The second line of enquiry pursues a collaborative artistic practice informed by dialogue and poetry, where the bipedals of walking and the binaries of the digital are entwined by phenomenology, hauntology, performance, and the in-betweens of animation. My practice-as-research methodology involves desk study, experimentation with VR, AR, digital photogrammetry, and CGI animation. Central to my approach is the multifaceted notion of Peripatos ̶ as a school of philosophy, a stroll-like walk, and the path where the stroll takes place ̶ manifested both corporeally and as 'playful curiosity'.
The thread that interweaves practice and theory has my body-moving in the centre; I call it the ‘camera-walk’: a processional shoot that documents a real place and the bodies that make it, while my hand holds high a camera-on-a-stick shooting 360-video. The resulting spherical video feeds into photogrammetric digital processing, and reassembles into digital 3D models that form the starting ground for still images, a site-specific installation, augmented reality (AR) exchanges, and short films. Because 360-video includes the body that carries the camera, the digital meshes produced by the ‘camera-walk’ also reveal the documentarian during the act of documenting. Departing from the pursuit of perfect replicas, my research articulates the iconic lineage of photogrammetry, embracing imperfections as integral.
Despite the planned obsolescence of my digital instruments, I treat my 360-camera as a ‘dangerous tool’, uncovering (and inventing) its hidden virtualities, via Vilém Flusser. Against its formative intentions as an accessory for extreme sports, I focus on everyday life, and become inspired by Harun Farocki’s ‘another kind of empathy’. Within the collaborative projects presented within my thesis, I move away from the colonialist-inspired ideal of ‘walking in someone else’s shoes’, and ‘tread softly’ along the footsteps of my co-walkers
