Developing an ecological consciousness through 360° immersive dance-making

This article focuses on a digital contemporary dance practice recently developed and authored as part of the artist-researcher's own auto-hermeneutic practice-based PhD study. It is through artistic practice that the self and other is investigated using improvisational dance making and 360° immersive technologies. This approach is described as an ecological practice using improvisation as the tool to develop the relationship between the body and the nonhuman. The practice takes place in non-anthropocentric spaces. 360° dance film offers opportunities to observe the self and to develop a consciousness that provides an expanded state of awareness. Using 360° digital technology the research ambition was to explore the ramifications of double embodiment, borrowing from Merleau-Ponty's concept of both being and seeing the body in the digital space simultaneously (Merleau-Ponty Citation1962). This type of subjectivity encompasses four experiential bodies throughout the process. These bodies are not static, they are in a perpetual process of becoming; the body is understood in an expanded sense (Haraway Citation1991). The 360° immersive dance-making practice embarks on a process of viewing the body as the other, to develop a new subjectivity, and ethical awareness appropriate for today's global crisis.