Engaging with Disengagement: Opting out, Slowing down in Digital Immersive Experiences Event
Text by Eleni Telemachou (MRes student in Immersive Theatre)
In today’s fast-paced, digitally dominated world, digital disengagement is perceived as a privilege, a necessary act of care or a political act of resistance. During IELab’s recent event, Engaging with Disengagement, participants were invited to explore concepts of slowing down and opting out through various creative experiences and critical discussions.
Image 1. Deceleration by ZU-UK
The event began with ZU-UK’s Deceleration, an audio-walk that guides participants through the process of slowing down. By highlighting the embodied experience of accelerating and decelerating, this creative experiment reminds participants that slowing down is a radical act that enables us to connect with ourselves and others. Deceleration was followed by the Serious Game Workshop led by Jorge Lopes Ramos (ZU-UK). The workshop explored the creative practice of interactive play by inviting participants to collaborate in designing and testing physical games that promote experiences of opting out and slowing down.
Image 2. Serious Game Workshop
The event was structured around an exhibition showcasing various creative practices. Jack Wrigley’s Monument to the Buzzed, a VR experience featuring public drone footage of Gaza relocated to a construction zone across the ARC, compels viewers to pause and consider what is often overlooked, encouraging reflection on social responsibility. Maria Sledmere and Kevin Leomo’s Project Somnolence combines video footage, sound, and reflective poetry to explore sleep as an act of digital disengagement, reminding audiences that neoliberal and capitalist pressures conflict with human needs. Iain Findlay-Walsh and Tristan Partridge’s experimental installations, Trust in Co-composition: Tracing Temporal Dynamics in Relational Research, use voice-note recordings to demonstrate that taking time to reflect on the temporality of hearing and sounding experiences is not only a valid research method but also an act of care, connection, and friendship. Finally, Carl Lavery’s video essay, One Thousand One Hundred and Forty-Eight Words on Deceleration and Landscape, connects reflections on lived, photographed, and painted landscapes to explore deceleration as a state of being.
Image 3. Project Somnolence as part of the event’s exhibition
The keynote lecture by Dr. Esperanza Miyake (University of Strathclyde) focused on the politics of deceleration, drawing on her research on digital disengagement to highlight the tension between opting out as a neoliberal commodity and a form of active resistance.
(Passcode: SuYN1^WW)
The event concluded with a panel discussion featuring Dr. Eirini Nedelkopoulou (IElab), Maria Sledmere & Kevin Leomo (Project Somnolescence), Dr. Iain Findlay-Walsh (IElab) & Dr. Tristan Partridge (University of California, SB), Prof. Jorge Lopes Ramos (ZU-UK), and LJ Findlay-Walsh (Take Me Somewhere). The participants reflected on how concepts of disengagement influence their research and creative work. During the discussion, it became apparent that art can create space for slowing down and reflection. Crucially, choosing to opt out and decelerate are essential strategies for fostering ethical practices that support artists and art organisations in caring for their well-being and responsibly tending to their audiences.
Image 4. Panel Discussion
IELab’s event offered various opportunities to examine disengagement, uncovering distinct collective needs and personal interests. Ultimately, for practitioners, researchers, and participants, disengagement can act as an opportunity to connect with the world and others. For humans, connection is a vital and meaningful act of care. However, in a society that constantly urges us to do and be more, disengagement can also become the most radical form of personal expression and resistance.
Curatorial note by Dr Eirini Nedelkopoulou (Immersive Experiences Lab Co-director)
This exhibition, part of the day event, Engaging with Disengagement: Opting out, Slowing Down in Digital Immersive Experiences (May 1st), reflects on and challenges our status as individuals navigating digital life, our daily reality. Digital detox, mindfulness, and self-care applications, aimed at escaping the noise and crowds of the participation economy, often prove futile and remain accessible only to a select few. Artistic practices vary in their responses to the anxiety or desire to withdraw from constant connectivity and relentless productivity, either by embracing approaches that promote slowing down, sleep, and solitude or by suggesting that disengagement and opting out are not an option in different circumstances and geographies.
The four pieces featured in this exhibition highlight human vulnerabilities, fostering new demands for care that resonate from the individual to the collective and back again. Rather than suggesting we give up on the world, these immersive installations encourage us to consider the shortcomings of our present condition within neoliberal society and imagine what role the imagination could (but often ceases to) fulfil.
Contact: eirini.nedelkopoulou@glasgow.ac.uk