the urge for phygital, ludic communities
Judit Navratil
Year
2022–2025
Supervisor
Margarete Jahrmann
Reflective Documentation
https://phaidra.bibliothek.uni-ak.ac.at/detail/o:75268
I research belonging and emotional care in phygital, ludic communities with a focus on new pedagogies that support non-dual connection beyond the human. The intention is to help a collective shift during these dizzy times: learning to be good ancestors, and accommodating digital doulas around the birth of AI, thus co-creating a safe space for the grandchildren. My methodology is based on my lived and virtual experiences. Since 2006, I’ve lived as an immigrant in various countries and cultures, continuously rerooting in different localities, nurturing and oscillating between offline and online, long-distance relationships long before social distancing and #movingonline became the new default. Therefore, in 2018 I started to grow a virtual social housing neighborhood, a multi-layered art project that considers the possibilities and dangers of “home” in cyberspace. My research stems from this project to summarize and properly journal these experiences and the learning curves of developing a VR neighborhood, including a social VR art residency program I founded in 2020. Although virtual connection and cyberspaces were central for a long while, digital fatigue has shifted my work toward embodied and physical communal patterns. Tumbling through these paths, my research questions the new structures of social capital, yearning for belonging, and the essence of collective care. In this study the potentials of cyber-topophilia are analysed through the lens of an immigrant growing up in the late communism of Hungary, being privileged to move abroad to South Korea, California, and British Columbia, and the attempts to plant seeds of love in the void of VR as a compass for my homesick heart. I dedicate this work to support the development of post-pandemic pedagogical tools for the new generations to inhabit and shape the “Metta-verse”1 with good intentions. Research questions: How do we translate and bring love into our expanded and accelerated digital layers, including AI, of existence? How to use these layers as tools to nurture human connection and communities and help this phygital merging process? What pedagogical and ludic practices nurture connection and community beyond the human and support new generations in the shift of birthing AI?
Footnote 1 I switched using the trite term metaverse as the well-known corporation expropriated this commons, rather referring to the meditation practice.