Embodied architectures: moving and drawing with sensory and digital data

This essay reflects on the Patience in Placemaking, AHRA 2023, workshop held by dancers/choreographers Virginia Farman, Victoria Hunter and interior architect Belinda Mitchell, that explored alternative modes of knowing the built environment through dance improvisational processes and drawing methods that cultivated ‘caring-for’ the emerging environment, moving and making together. The workshop took place in a design studio and at the University of Portsmouth’s Centre for Creative and Immersive and Extended Reality, CCIXR. In the workshop, LiDAR images taken from Wymering Manor - a sixteenth century house in Cosham, UK - were streamed within the walls of a SmartStage. This provided a physical space for some workshop participants to move with the data as others observed the unfolding event and recorded their impressions through drawing with sticks and charcoal on paper. Objects from Wymering Manor were also brought into the space (a vase, a tall stand and a gate legged side table) for participants to rearrange and place on the SmartStage as part of an improvised movement score.