"I'm not here": The Doubled Body Dances Death in the Wild Sensorium of VR/Immersive Artworks in/out of Asia

I smell burned debris. In Shiota Chiharu's The Soul Trembles, nets of singed knotted black thread and string cover objects, choking them in matted, fibrous traps. A piano, hacked and burned, is wrapped into a cocoon of strangling charcoal threads. I circle around two ghostly white figures, tethered and suspended in nets of time, before/after hanging? I drift inside their threads, headless. Then oceans of red thread suffocate. Thread-enveloped boats are memorials for drowned migrants. Entering Christian Boltanski's Lifetime, Shadows, Murmurs, a twilight space, shadow figures loop across walls: skulls grin, lights flicker, shadows blind. A mannequin in trench coat, leans like a tombstone, utters, dying. In Hayoun Kwon's VR work, D.M.Z. Memories of No Man's Land, I enter through clanking gates. Forests rise darkly against sunset skies. A landmine explodes, a flaming geyser. I fall down, into the sky.

How do these artists deploy repression/control and suffocation of sensations, to force-open an activist sensorium, suppressed/shackled into prescriptions of sensing norms? I reference Jack Halberstam's Wild Things and Anne Anlin Cheng's Ornamentalism, where the synthetic challenges "the division of living and non-living" to consider how these physical experiences across VR and installation artworks can activate a decolonizing dis-ordering of our controlled sensorium and expand "other" sense knowledges. I "work" these experiences through a choreographic scheme of detailed attention to sense exposures and a "mortuary" consciousness of respect for the ends of senses, where kinaesthetic and visual-aural life passes. How do artists channel virtuality's materiality through bodies and deaths? Nowhere dances.