DISRUPTING THE FIFTH WALL

This practice-research project explores how immersive performance can resist the authority of technological systems from within. The work foregrounds technological friction, exposure, and failure as methodological tools to reveal the hidden infrastructures shaping digital experience. It explores how breaking Steyerl’s “fifth wall” (2021) can foster more honest forms of immersion, giving audiences clearer agency in how they encounter the work and the technological scaffolding that underpins it.

The project follows a practice-led, collaborative methodology in which dramaturgical and technical decisions are made live in relation to performers, audiences and digital systems. Using tools such as volumetric capture, mixed reality headsets and real-time visual platforms, it deliberately engages with glitches and failures, treating them as dramaturgical cues. Each iteration will be developed with partners in R&D and performance contexts, documented through video, 3D captures, and reflective writing. This process will refine a flexible live techno-dramaturgical approach that stays attentive to both politics of the tools and the people entangled with them.