Immersion
The first session of Screen Cultures, a new research forum focused on the forms and futures of the screen.
Immersion is the first event in Screen Cultures, an interdisciplinary research forum for scholars and students in the School of Arts, Communication and English (SACE) at the University of Sydney in which to explore the scholarship of screens.
As with each event in the series, Immersion will feature a presentation of new research by a SACE academic and PhD student, followed by a response from an invited guest, and then lots of time for general discussion.
This session will bring together perspectives from cinema, virtual reality, and digital art to reflect on how screen-based practices create embodied, affective, and temporal/spatial experiences in the form of immersivity. It will occur alongside the immersive and multisensory exhibition What Lies Beneath, curated by Robyn Backen and John Tonkin at SCA Gallery (7 August - 6 September).
Chris Chesher will ask: What is the magic in the medium of virtual reality? He will explore the senses of presence and immersion produced through the apparatus of avocations, evocations and invocationary action.
Wenqi Tan will discuss the interplay of immersion and disability in social virtual reality (VR). Through exploring the creative, archival, and modification practices among disability communities in VRChat, she will question taken-for-granted notions of how immersion is encountered, experienced, and sustained in social VR space.
Ben Joseph Andrews respond by delving into his experiential practice, exploring the ways XR technologies may act as a reflexive lens through which to understand and express his own experiences of disabled (mis)embodiment.
What is SACE?
The School of Arts, Communication and English (SACE) is a grouping of disciplines at the University of Sydney that explore how people perceive the world and express themselves through various literary, verbal, visual, digital, and performative modes. It includes the disciplines of Art History, Museum and Heritage Studies, Film Studies, English and Writing, Media and Communications, Theatre and Performance Studies, and the Sydney College of the Arts.
Screen Cultures is convened by Nick Croggon, Andrew Sully and Will Mu, and is part of the 2025 SACE Research Event Series, with support from the Power Institute.
More about SACE
People
Wenqi Tan
Wenqi Tan is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney and a Singapore Social Science Research Council Graduate Research Fellow. Her research focuses on inclusion in new media, communication, and technology—including virtual reality (VR) and autonomous vehicles. She’s interested how digital spaces can be meaningfully inclusive for disabled people, especially for the purposes of community-building, social participation, and play. Wenqi’s thesis research centres disability inclusion in the materiality, design, and cultures of social VR.
Chris Chesher
Dr Chris Chesher is Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures in the Discipline of Media and Communications. He co-founded the Digital Cultures program and the Master of Digital Communication and Culture. He was previously senior lecturer in the School of Media and Communications at the University of New South Wales. He has a PhD from Macquarie University, a Masters in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of New South Wales, and Bachelor of Arts (Media and Communications) from Mitchell CAE (now Charles Sturt University). His transdisciplinary approach to digital cultures, media studies and cultural studies connects with philosophy of technology, science and technology studies, games studies, internet studies, sociology of technology, human-computer interaction, social robotics, cultural robotics and digital humanities.
Ben Joseph Andrews
Ben Joseph Andrews is a new media artist and creative technologist from Wathaurong country in regional Australia. His practice harnesses emerging and embodied technologies to expand perceptions and instill a sense of wonder to the world we inhabit. His work - often created in partnership with regular collaborator Emma Roberts - includes projects such as Turbulence: Jamais Vu, which won the IDFA DocLab Award for Immersive Non-Fiction in 2023 and has been exhibited at Watershed Bristol, the Wales Millennium Centre, and Venice Film Festival’s Best of Immersive program, picking up awards at ANIDOX (Special Jury Mention), Art*VR (Best Design) and Beyond the Frame (Best Experience). Their project Gondwana (2022), a constantly-evolving virtual ecosystem declining over a day’s exhibition, has been visited by over 100,000 audiences around the world, including at Sundance (US), SxSW Austin and Sydney, CPH:DOX, the South Australian Museum, Adelaide Festival, MIT Open Documentary Lab and Science Gallery Michigan, and has just begun a three-year tour of Australia as part of Experimenta’s Emergence program. He is a fellow of the Venice Biennale College (Italy) and Frame Documentary Lab (Australia) and has spoken for NYU Tisch, Sundance Film Festival, Heide Museum of Modern Art and MIT Open Documentary Lab.
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