CenSoF lead: Lisa May Thomas

Soma is an hour-long collective participatory experience that takes participants on a sensory journey and offers them the opportunity to explore different ways of ‘seeing’ and ‘feeling’ across physical, virtual, and imagined realities. The piece explores the tension between somatic experience, our capacity to sense and feel our living and moving bodies, and the ocular centric realm of VR technology.

“I think there was something happening within me - it’s like I was waking up”

Soma was developed as a performance, hosted by the Bloomsbury theatre in London in 2021 and supported by a grant from Arts Council England. Guided by a team of dancers, participants explored the sensory, material, and connective qualities of wide elastic loops, as both physical and virtual entities, in movement-based collaborative play. In 2023, we developed a new version of Soma, without the dancers, in which participants are invited to guide one another through the experience. This version has been tested with students at the University of Bristol and the University of Bath, and with visually impaired people.

We are exploring Soma with different participant groups in the Caring Futures domain as a practice to think and move through some of the ways in which sociodigital futures are being envisaged, with immersive technologies such as VR and AR. We are interested in how Soma might be used as an experiential method to provoke dialogue and speculate on alternative futures.

Further information: Soma website.