The COVID-19 pandemic impacted performing artists, compelling them to rethink how to create and present works. Many artists turned to digital technologies, maintaining a connection with audiences despite physical distancing. Virtual events emerged as a crucial platform, where performers engaged with audiences through video-sharing platforms and telecommunication services. However, this shift to digital performance lacked the human closeness that characterises in-person experiences. To bridge this gap and recreate the intimate connection between artists and audiences, virtual reality (VR) offers a promising solution to preserve the sense of intimacy and allows for reimagining the concept of “technoculture”, placing the audience in the performer’s perspective and fostering a deeper immersive engagement. This perspective paper explores VR’s potential to transform theatrical experiences, focusing on the adaptation of the play The Dark Master by the Japanese psychiatrist-turned-director/playwright Kuro Tanino. The paper will argue how VR can create a symbiotic relationship between the audience and the artist, enabling a fluid shift in perspective through the lens of posthuman practices. By analysing this performance, the paper seeks to underscore how integrating technology into the performing arts can offer fresh insights into societal and individual conditions. In updating the 1960s-70s immersive performances of Terayama Shūji and Kara Jūrō interpreted as political statements about the people’s need to reconnect with their senses and disconsolate unresolved feelings, Kuro connects to them by creating a cultural geography where the disfiguration is a main concern with its sensibility leading to sense irruption that plays with the senses to generate a psychic disturbance.

This Perspectives article is informed by an ongoing practice-as-research that examines the empowering effects and creative potential of menstrual cups and discs in challenging menstruation taboos and promoting gender equity and equanimity. Beginning with a personal introduction that traces the roots of my fascination with menstrual products, the text explores the archaeology of menstrual devices to uncover reasons behind their delayed commercial success. In the second part, I describe how menstrual cups have inspired a growing number of artists to create transformative artworks that critique and dismantle historical discrimination against people who menstruate. Drawing on selected case studies of my own artworks employing blood, specifically menstrual blood, I argue that engaging with bodily fluids, porosity, and menstruation can rekindle a deep appreciation for what I call 'the compassionate beauty of life'. I suggest that embracing life in all its facets supports a quiet yet resilient resistance to contemporary necropolitics—those power structures that, as Achille Mbembe writes, 'express sovereignty as the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die' (Mbembe 2003).

As a performance poet, I like to combine spoken performance and visual storytelling and use an array of visual props that often recycle my personal past archive of artworks as an artist from the last twenty-five years into the present. Conversely, this Perspective article is a reflective account of how I make use of sound during my live solo performances by way of C90 cassette tape recordings I have made spanning the course of 30–40 years. Whilst the article refers to a selection of live (poetry) performance works that I have made, the article concentrates discussion on three works which use cassette tape recordings in different ways to create soundscapes that often transport the listener to the past and/or the listener is unsure of how many voices there are in the performance space. The first performance I discuss is How Can I Get My Partner To Be My Finger? (2019) which presents a conversation between a couple – one present, one technologically distant – my partner Alex and I and refer to and discuss how Alex ‘speaks through’ my finger via a tape-recording. In discussion of the second performance, SEE ME: A Walk Through London’s Gay Soho 1994 and 2020 (2021), I refer to how I make performative use of a mixtape compilation that I made in 1994. Lastly, in discussion of the third performance, Tackle (2022), I refer to my usage of a cassette recording in 1996 of a football match I attended with my Dad between Chelsea and Manchester United.

Art psychotherapy training programmes traditionally emphasise evidence-based practices focused on interpersonal and psychological change, often sidelining socio-political dimensions and critical research pedagogies. To address this gap, this paper presents a posthuman feminist approach to research pedagogies in art psychotherapy. This approach leverages arts-based practices and digital technologies as critical tools for examining complex entanglements between human, nature, and technology (techne) rendering insights into data collection and analysis beyond conventional paradigms. This pedagogical theorisation draws on examples from collective arts-based workshops rendering posthuman theoretical concepts into practical, tangible learning experiences. The workshops presented in this paper utilise artistic processes as both methodological and critical vehicles, inviting students to explore a research workshop through the lens of two Deleuzian concepts, those being the situated material assemblage and the Body Without Organs (BWO). The key rationale is to develop critical reflexivity through using conceptual tools that that disrupt normative hegemonies in art psychotherapy data analysis by positioning data as a co-constructed material-semiotic inscription shaped by intersecting human and non-human forces. The outcomes of this posthuman pedagogical framework, employing digital and arts-based diffractive methodologies and ethological assemblage in enacted data analyses, were a facilitated non-hierarchical synthesis in data relations between human, nonhuman and digital bodies and the stimulation of a more inclusive transdisciplinary inquiry, generating insights into systemic issues in healthcare beyond a patriarchal logic and purely anthropocentric reach. The approach positions students as active agents in co-producing knowledge that challenges dominant socio-economic structures in health research.

The battlefield in Ukraine is a combination of World War I style trenches, the counter terrorism command centers and fleets of adapted commercial drones virtually wired together by everyday internet technology. The wide use of ‘wedding’ drones DJI Mavic on Ukrainian battlefield blurs the line between the type of drones used to fight wars and to film weddings. What happens when the underground world of DIY drones building, and drone racing is co-opted by the military? The regular presence of small, reconnaissance drones over conflict zone sow confusion, fear, and terror among soldiers. The small drones, the eyes in a sky, induce the feeling of exposure and lethal voyeurism wherever they are on the ground. Small drones are not classified as military hardware, although with millions of those already in circulation and the technology to build them freely available, the army of drones is on the battlefield for good. There are unconfirmed reports of Russia and Ukraine experimenting with drones that can identify and attack targets without human input, using artificial intelligence. Needless to say, the fully autonomous killer drones are changing the thinking about rules of war and demand new modes of diplomacy to prevent escalatory threat.

In this paper I provide a framework for enhancing seemingly objective approaches to AI risk assessment in a way that doesn't just see risk as only scaling vertically, levelling up through thresholds and tolerances(intensities). It draws on Raqs Media Collective’s An Infra-vocabulary for Capital (2023-2024) and considers how the work can be adapted to imagine horizontal formations of risk (accumulations) by using language and naming resulting in different apertures and resolutions on the relations that hold that risk together as a latent force in operational space.

This paper develops a critique of the Neuralink brain-computer interface as an intended general population device through a reading of the short story ‘Forever’ (2020) by xenofeminist theorist and author Amy Ireland. It explores the co-constitutive relationship between ageing and technology, in which technologies are shaped by ideas about ageing, and ideas about ageing are shaped by technologies, through the figure of the ‘grey cyborg.’ By pairing literary analysis with a science and technology studies (STS) perspective, it examines how the ageing body is shaped through culture and technology. It focuses on the speculation that Neuralink will eventually contribute to ‘unlocking human potential’ through the preservation and enhancement of the human brain. The ideological framework that underwrites Neuralink is contrasted with the portrayal of a de-ageing technology in ‘Forever.’ This story centres a conflict between a wealthy male gerontocrat who has been ‘de-aged,’ and grey-haired female anti-immortality operatives that sabotage the technological gerontocracy infrastructure. Through my reading of this text as xenofeminist theory-fiction, I interpret the sabotage as directed not towards the material technology but instead the systemic power disparities that it risks entrenching. I argue that the story’s network of ageing anti-immortality activists represents a feminist posthumanism capable of politicising the application of technologies such as Neuralink as a consumer device. By contextualising ‘Forever’ and Neuralink together, this paper challenges prevalent narratives about ageing and demonstrates how xenofeminist theory offers new possibilities for situating ageing with technology within broader critical understandings of bodies, technologies and their interfaces.

Atop a desk sits a fax machine, a technology that you haven’t used in years or, perhaps, your only memory of it is from having seen it in old TV shows. Curious, you approach the object. As you walk closer, the phone rings, as if anticipating you. You grab the phone and hear a matter-of-fact voice introducing itself as Berna, inviting you to press one to begin. A Conversation with Berna (Vallverdu, 2024) is an interactive piece that speaks to the banality of the present from the banality of the past, using obsolete technology to reflect on our current digital landscape. It reminds us that familiar technology can vanish rapidly, and that data, often perceived as intangible, has a physical footprint (Mageswari, Manoharan and Poomalai, 2022). The piece emphasizes a phenomenological approach, urging the audience to physically experience data. While VR has been used to explore concepts like big data (Raghunathan, 2015), Berna provides a sensory experience where data is rendered in touchable paper form, engaging our sense of smell, weight, and tactility. In an era dominated by AI, Berna poses a question: should creative technology focus solely on advanced AI and VR, or should it address practical, everyday issues?