Somatic Vessels – slow engagement in physical and virtual reality (2024)

Workshop at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, UK

This workshop was conducted during my time as a guest researcher of the Museum Studies School at the University of Leicester, in collaboration with fellow PhD candidate Shelby Navone. Our project ‘Somatic Vessels’ invited students and academics in the school to slowly engage with a collection of vessels in physical and digital form.

The process involved a slow Saturday wander around the city of Leicester where we collected objects from local charity shops that became the focus of the experience. The three interventions we designed for the workshop included a physical experience of the objects guided by slow sensory engagement prompts. We also experimented with 3D scanning the objects which became an AR experience of the objects (pictured above to the right) and we designed a VR activity (pictured above to the left) where we invited participants to draw their own virtual vessels using digital brushes.