ABSTRACT
My interest in presence was triggered by a fall I had in Ecuador at the turn of this century, a fall which – as I remember it – induced a powerful outof-body experience. As I fell to what I imagined would be my certain death, I had the vivid feeling that the experience was ‘just a dream’ and on landing my body seemed far below me. Somewhere in the Amazon jungle there was a young woman lying on the ground. I could hear someone shouting far off and my body felt itself catapulted down a long tunnel towards the source of the sound. I came back into my embodied awareness with an explosion of green and yellow and began to recognise the voice calling out as my own. The strange shifts in temporal and sensory experience that I felt that day stayed with me: an irrepressible memory that the capacities of our sensing bodies went far beyond ‘normal’ everyday experience, and that there were diverse and startling territories of feeling and being. This visceral opening of the horizons of my body experience had conveyed a very real sense that perception of reality is contingent, malleable and inherently creative. An awareness that art and literature, science and experimentation had put on my radar, but the fall flung open a metaawareness of my own felt experience, and revitalised my understanding of the possibilities within my own sensory system. My art practice over the next decade – starting in experimental theatre, improvisation and puppetry and then incorporating digital technologies – reached out for ways of navigating sensory possibilities, encouraging audiences to explore with alternative ways of being. I soon discovered that this focus on the shifting nature of how we model and locate our lived experience is at the heart of presence research.1 J.J. Gibson defines presence as ‘the sense of being in an environment’ (1979): a usefully succinct definition of a wide and complex field of research. I started to focus on virtual and mixed reality performances in relationship to presence research and contemporary scientific studies on multisensory perception.
