The images are from the immersive environment for two-year-olds made at MMU black box theatre with Anna Daley, Dr Christina Macrae and the fabulous Martinscroft Nursery School. This installation was at the heart of my doctoral research project, More Than Words, which aims to reconceptualise understandings of young children’s communication through improvisational arts practices.
Using music and dance with materials such as silk, string, and light, children, parents, artists and educators adopted a practice of stripping back talk in order to tune into the multiplicitous encounters and communications that are going on between children and the world.
I was particularly excited about being able to attach elastic and string to the scaffolding lighting bars on the ceiling. Attaching things is often problematic so this was an opportunity to play with swinging, pinging, dodging, pulling, twanging, twisting from secure anchors. As the installation had to be set up very quickly, we left the rest of the space fairly stripped back to begin with leaving packed-up materials (musical instruments, duvets, tubes and fabrics to be found and unpacked by the children. These unpacking and unfoldings became the transitions which, together with the soundtrack, shaped the abstract story of the immersive experience.
My immersive environments offer multiple, varied and open-ended ways to engage. Many things are happening simultaneously yet related through the affects, textures, sonics, bodies and movements of the space.
I used a 360˚ video camera to film the event. This more-than-human technology observes in ways radically different to ‘framed’ video. It makes tangible young children’s entangled knowledge through relation and movement in ways that are not perceptible to the adult gaze or traditional video technology.
I also used Tcam - my toddler-driven, freely, rolling, position-able, child’s height, video camera which is designed to be an ‘embodied camera drawn into the world’ (Grimshaw & Ravetz 2015). Tcam had been in the children's nursery room for a couple of weeks and they had freely played with it. Its camera can live feed to an iPad, projector or nursery monitor offering potential for augmentation (e.g making small things big or close up) making special or giving focus to ‘things that would be overlooked from an ‘adult-centric view’. (Caton 2019). The feed from T cam was projected throughout the installation sessions.
