Abstract
“Bovine Calling喚/幻牛: A VR Story of Eco-Vulnerability in Hong Kong” (2023) – a project that explores the limits and possibilities of digital storytelling in evoking more-than-human experiences of health, vulnerability, and wellbeing in metropolitan Hong Kong. Bovine Calling is a virtual reality narrative that immerses you in the entangled worlds of buffalos, cows, and humans as they navigate precarity and alterity living in a neoliberal capitalist society. It ruminates on an interspecies ethic of vulnerability that shifts away from human exceptionalism to appreciate reciprocal care and interdependence between human health and environmental health.
The exhibition embeds audiences in unexpected scenarios, habitats, and sensory encounters that artistically merge the social worlds of urban dwellers and cows and buffalos on Lantau Island. Vulnerability is not quickly dismissed as victimhood, but redefined as existential default and ethical possibilities toward an ecological collective of multispecies coexistence. As virtual reality becomes iridescent with the ecological pulses of ancestral power, Bovine Calling asks how human emotional, social, and ecological wellbeing depends on being responsive to the diverse murmurs of life collectively sustaining our world-in-precarity.
Bovine Calling is supported by the HKBU Arts Faculty Research Impact Fund and done in collaboration with the HKU Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit.
The exhibition embeds audiences in unexpected scenarios, habitats, and sensory encounters that artistically merge the social worlds of urban dwellers and cows and buffalos on Lantau Island. Vulnerability is not quickly dismissed as victimhood, but redefined as existential default and ethical possibilities toward an ecological collective of multispecies coexistence. As virtual reality becomes iridescent with the ecological pulses of ancestral power, Bovine Calling asks how human emotional, social, and ecological wellbeing depends on being responsive to the diverse murmurs of life collectively sustaining our world-in-precarity.
Bovine Calling is supported by the HKBU Arts Faculty Research Impact Fund and done in collaboration with the HKU Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit.
| Original language | Multiple languages |
|---|---|
| Publication status | Published - 22 Sept 2023 |
