Between 2023 and 2024, I collaborated with dance artist and researcher Dr. Lisa May Thomas. Together we were awarded funding from University of Bristol's Bristol Digital Futures Institute to work with "Cognition" and explore ​questions around access and inclusion in VR for visually impaired participants, while implementing a participatory and co-design model of actively engaging underrepresented audiences in the creative process of the immersive experience "Cognition".

This project was supported by Bristol's community center, Knowle West Media Centre (KWMC) and industry partner Ultraleap.

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Cognition is an one-person immersive VR narrative and physical installation exploring power, agency and body autonomy through a steampunk world shaped by social injustice. Audiences interact with real, tactile objects that shape the VR narrative.

Cognition is a modern allegory about machinery of power: economic, social, cultural, and how it shapes our bodies, identities, and sense of self. In Cognition's steampunk, machine-driven world, the only currency is flesh: a metaphor for labor, autonomy, and the compromises we make to survive. Rooted in my life experience growing up in Greece during the economic crisis, Cognition asks whether our choices are truly ours, or already shaped, pre-selected, by the systems we inhabit. What does it mean to own a body when survival depends on using it to navigate systems we did not choose? What happens when control, that most fragile illusion, slips through our fingers?

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During this year-long development of my creative work, I collaborated with Dr. Lisa and creative technologist Joseph Wilk to explore ideas around embodiment and immersion in the digital space, playing with the effects of sensory alignment and misalignment in the PhyDital (physical and digital) Cognition and understand how sensory misalignment impact the everyday lives of people with sensory disabilities, asking the question: Can people that experience sensory misalignment in their daily lives, feel immersed and embodied in an XR experience?

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After our cross-disciplinary creative explorations with Dr. Lisa and Joseph, we opened Cognition to the marginalized audiences we wanted to collaborate with, designing and facilitating the Cognition Workshops for visually impaired participants.

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During the workshops, we introduced to the participants the VR technology we were using, we discussed the inherent accessibility issues of the VR medium and compared them to the accessibility challenges our participants are called to face and navigate in their daily lives. 

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Through sensory play and exploration with clay crafting, storytelling, and imagining, we collaboratively created alternative stories of resilience and care for the Cognition characters that allowed them to escape their inhuman world, while also exploring ways of experiencing VR with alternative senses, and specifically with a focus on touch, for VR accessibility to visually impaired audiences. 

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I continue developing the Cognition interactive installation inviting more marginalized communities to work collaboratively with a current focus on women from culturally diverse and low socioeconomic background. I aim to empower marginalized audiences to share their stories through Cognition, making the artwork open, accessible and inclusive to diverse audiences and needs. 

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Cognition was showcased at Arnolfini (Bristol's  international arts center and gallery) in 2021 and it was shortlisted for the TechSPARKS’s “Best Use of XR” award in 2022. In 2024, our Cognition Workshops work was presented to the Chief Scientific Advisor, Dame Angela McLean at the Bristol Digital Futures Institute. 

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More about the Cognition Workshops project at the BDFI's website.

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