Expanded Experience: An ‘Artist-Bricoleur’ Approach to Writing VR in Contemporary Art

Although Virtual Reality (VR) is a 40-year-old technology, its use across various screen-centric industries including entertainment, design, and education remains significantly varied, arguably limiting the emergence of a clear history of practice through which the medium can be coherently theorised. Against this background, VR software and hardware has become increasingly accessible, allowing contemporary visual artists to create VR artworks that interrogate the technology’s formal and conceptual conditions, and in turn expand the experiential potentials of the medium. Similar to how avant-gardist film and video art practices of the twentieth century enriched the language of the moving image, contemporary visual artists making experimental VR can greatly contribute to the medium’s still-emerging formal language and expand the framework of theory and practice. This chapter will explore the processes of creating experimental VR in this contemporary art context; locating the medium’s spatio-temporal qualities in the lineage of art history and describing how a digital bricolage methodology streamlines the creative development process to draw out new experiential and conceptual understandings of the medium.