Annie Xu

The practice-based research study explores how speculative performance design, developed through hybrid scenographic practices, can create immersive narrative space, which prompts emotional and critical thinking about emotionally diminished futures. This speculativepremise forms the core of the project, which envisions a far-off civilisation that has lost empathy, creativity, and emotional depth, and fails to reclaim those abilities. This speculation serves as a lens through which we are able to reconsider the frailty of the human experience in technologically accelerated societies. The research, instead of providing a linear narrative, transfigures the speculative ideas into spatial, sensorial, and performance experiences. The research methodologically takes a hybrid scenographic approach, combining virtual production and physical fabrication. In which spatial scale and atmosphere are explored, using digital modelling, VR testing and animation and material experimentation. Enabling the work to be assessed through a more embodied approach. This dual-pathway process constitutes a feedback loop between the virtual and physical worlds and, therefore, positions a form of inquiry.

Using performative approaches, such as light, sound, and large-scale installation, the project will encourage visitors to create meaning through movement, perception, and experience. The resultant installation is a speculative scenographic space which blurs the boundary between the audience and the stage. Additionally, the characters of Chinese bronze scripts(jinwen, 金文 ) are used in the installation as both semiotic and performative means. Their pictographic features and fragmented presentation endow language with spatial forms and promote interpretive interaction over established meaning. This research integrates speculative design, performance design, and hybrid scenography to add a practice-based framework to build immersive narrative spaces that excite emotional awareness, cultural symbolism and reflection of experiences. Instead of providing solutions, the project places immersive speculation as a way of challenging what could be lost and what might still remain valuable in the emotionally diminished futures.