Nathaniel Mason
About the researcher
I am a creative technologist working collaboratively across performative XR experiences. Since 2014, I have been working with artists, musicians and theatre companies to find meaningful ways of weaving technology into their practice. Most recently, I have worked with Common/Wealth theatre company on the critically acclaimed site-specific performance Demand the Impossible, the digital iteration of which currently forms the core of my practice-research at Falmouth University.
Research interests
- Immersive Performance
- Techno-dramaturgy
- Live technology
- Volumetric Capture
- XR/Mixed Reality
- Capture Technologies
- Glitch and Failure
- Technofeminism
- Presence
- Resistance
- AI (Realtime diffusion pipelines)
PhD abstract
Thesis title
Disrupting the Fifth Wall: Expanding Approaches to Immersive Techno-dramaturgy
Abstract
This practice-research project explores how immersive performance can resist the authority of technological systems from within. The work foregrounds technological friction, exposure, and failure as methodological tools to reveal the hidden infrastructures shaping digital experience. It explores how breaking Steyerl’s “fifth wall” (2021) can foster more honest forms of immersion, giving audiences clearer agency in how they encounter the work and the technological scaffolding that underpins it.
The project follows a practice-led, collaborative methodology in which dramaturgical and technical decisions are made live in relation to performers, audiences and digital systems. Using tools such as volumetric capture, mixed reality headsets and real-time visual platforms, it deliberately engages with glitches and failures, treating them as dramaturgical cues. Each iteration will be developed with partners in R&D and performance contexts, documented through video, 3D captures, and reflective writing. This process will refine a flexible live techno-dramaturgical approach that stays attentive to both politics of the tools and the people entangled with them.