Investigating empathy through digital costume design

Digital costume design can critically impact how audiences empathize with and understand others. When integrated with virtual reality technology, these costumes made of digital materials can be “worn” by audience-participants to immerse them in a first-person perspective of the performance experience. My artistic research project investigates how digital costumes can generate performances that evoke interaffective empathy between audience-partcipants. This costume-led research project is theoretically framed by costume thinking, a concept developed by scenographer and scholar Sofia Pantouvaki (2020) to position costume practice as a tool for critically understanding human presence. It is additionally framed by the concept of insubordinate costume (Marshall, 2024) which proposes costume as an agent for performance. Utilizing these frameworks, my objective is to design digital costumes that evoke shared affective empathy, or interaffectivity (Fuchs, 2014), through costume-driven performance experiences in virtual reality. My artistic research methodology centers around an iterative sequence of studio practice and exploratory workshops. The findings will be shared with the public as a series of demo performances and as an article-based doctoral thesis. This interdisciplinary research uses cutting-edge technology to advance the field of costume studies, establish digital costume design as its own discipline, and conceptualize what it means to embody a digital costume and experience what it’s like to be someone else. As digital environments become increasingly prevalent, it is crucial to develop new theoretical insights from practice. When we know how digital costume can shape experience, practitioners can be more intentional and ethical with the representations they create through digital costume design.

PHASE I: EXPLORATION

I am currently investigating how digital materials can be embodied in virtual reality. How does structure, appearance, and behavior impact the costume's agency to generate performance?