Tiny Uppercase. Our hidden sense is the first study of a two-year multidisciplinary creation project produced by Balletto Teatro di Torino and presented on 21 May 2022 at Lavanderia a Vapore in Collegno. Bringing together dance, music, research, and extended reality, the work invited four spectators at a time to cross physical and virtual worlds, transforming a performance into an intimate perceptual journey through the body, space, and time.

The research began during the Covid-19 emergency, when isolation, social distancing, and restrictions profoundly altered the way bodies occupied space and entered into relation with one another. Against this background, Tiny Uppercase set out to reimagine the perception of one’s own body, the bodies of others, and the surrounding world. Its “hidden sense” is proprioception: the continuous, mostly unconscious flow of information through which we perceive the position, tension, balance, and movement of the body and recognise it as our own.

Proprioception became both the subject of the work and its operative principle. The project asked how external conditions influence bodily perception; where the limits of the body are; whether a technological environment can produce the sensation of inhabiting another body; and whether experiencing another point of view can generate empathy. The body was approached not simply as biological matter but as a lived and relational body: the place through which identity is constructed and contact with others becomes possible.

The technological design, conceived by Vanessa Vozzo, connected recent practices in expanded and future cinema with social and cognitive research, performance, and dance. The system combined immersive cinema, real-time 360° streaming, augmented reality, and VR to experiment with embodiment and perceptual-sensory disorientation. Wearing a headset, the spectator could experience a sense of presence within a body and, above all, within a space different from their own. Sensory perception, temporality, and self-location were modified in real time through the friction between the physical surroundings, the streamed environment, and virtual elements.

This research continues the trajectory of Vozzo’s project Presence, initiated in 2019 with researchers and students from the Interface Culture master’s programme in Linz and first presented at Ars Electronica, then further developed within Officine Sintetiche. Within this broader body of work, Tiny Uppercase operates as a post-media practice: it does not treat VR, streaming, live performance, sound, and moving images as separate media, but combines them into a single relational dispositif. Technology is therefore neither an accessory nor a spectacular overlay. It mediates the senses, destabilises habitual perception, and becomes part of the dramaturgy through which presence and intimacy are produced.

The 2022 study was created through cycles of artistic and technical residencies and a transdisciplinary process in which choreography, multimedia and UX design, sound, lighting, costume, 360° cinematography, 3D modelling, technical art, and Unity development continuously influenced one another. A dedicated technical and network system developed by Francesco Strada enabled four spectators to participate simultaneously. Artists and dancers worked with professionals, lecturers, researchers, and selected students from the Politecnico di Torino, the University of Turin’s StudiumLab and CIRMA, Officine Sintetiche, and the European Design Institute of Turin.

By merging the tangible and the virtual, Tiny Uppercase sought to create an emotional connection between spectators and performers and to offer dance from a dynamic, continuously shifting perspective. The work proposes XR not merely as a new format for presenting performance, but as an interdisciplinary instrument for investigating reality, emotions, empathy, and the unstable boundaries between the self and the other.