Good Girl VR: straddling installation art, performance art, and identity politics with a virtual environment

Good Girl is a mixed reality installation highlighting the negotiated relationships within Tonia’s intersectional existence. The piece involves a VR art installation set in an alternate reality where the artist is in a comatose state. Participants visit Good Girl Labs, a laboratory run by the artist’s followers to study the artist’s body. In Good Girl Labs, visitors are guided by a lab technician to connect to the artist’s subconscious where they can encounter a series of dynamic personas representing a relational map of the social, political, and economic layers of the artist’s American’t life as a queer first generation child of Middle Eastern immigrants raised digital. This paper proposes Good Girl VR as one example to think about how VR can be used in reference to installation and performance art and how such an elite medium can be used to illustrate paraspatial realities and counter-narratives. ❧ To experiment towards our innovative design goals, we crack at a tough pipeline: mixing live action stereo captures, with 3d composited environments, played back in real time. Assessing the technical challenges at play for theoretical innovation was a humbling practical approach to design research.