Virtual Bodies of Fertility

Countering Bodily and Spatial Standardisation in the Virtual World

Mutaleni Ya Toivo

MArch 2022

Supervisors:
Unit Leader: Jiaxin Yan Gong
Unit Assistant: Ruth Manda
Unit Assistant: Thandeka Mnguni

UNIT 14
Rogue Roots: Magic of Port and Passage

Awards
Examiner’s Choice:  Dr Emma Nsugbe

Virtual Bodies of Fertility: Countering Bodily and Spatial Standardisation in the Virtual World seeks to investigate and explore the potential of the virtual world in breaking and altering seemingly hard-set standards, such as the body and in turn its spatial surrounding by generating a series of virtual landscapes governed by the physicality of the body and its cultural significance in producing fertile or nourishing landscapes. This research is conducted through explorative and experimental methods of drawing and model making that play on architectural concepts of scale, materiality and perspective, using existing 3D modeling software to project between the two worlds of real and virtual to alter given standards and ideals of the body. These methods reference the works of architecture, design and multimedia studio Space Popular. The intention is to test architecture’s potential in defining and generating new worlds beyond the existing realities that we know through the constant and intimate shift between the two worlds. This presents a new port of exchange of landscapes and bodies to manifest altered standards and spatial configurations tested and drawn from the virtual world.

Keywords:
Body, Standardisation, Reimagined Realities, Landscapes, Altered New Worlds, Virtual World