Drosera Obscura: Live Vocal Performance with Animatronics, Artist Talk, and Behind the Scenes Presentation

Drosera Obscura merges live vocal performance, animatronics, extended reality (XR), spatial sound, scent, and touch into a multisensory performance environment. This interdisciplinary collaboration between Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT) and McGill University’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) explores new relationships between human performers, responsive robotic forms, and immersive technologies.

Set within a speculative posthuman cranberry bog, Drosera Obscura creates an evolving ecology in which performers, audiences, virtual environments, and animatronic organisms coexist and respond to one another. Rather than treating XR as a standalone visual medium, the project approaches it as a performative ecosystem, bringing together sound, movement, robotics, scent, haptics, and embodied interaction.

Developed through collaborative workshops and performances in the ICAT Cube, the project integrates real time virtual environments, VR puppeteering, Maya driven animatronic control, Unreal Engine interactions, spatial audio, sensing systems, and live performance. Faculty, students, visiting artists, and international collaborators have contributed to the development of the animatronic forms, mobility systems, sound and narrative design, sensing technologies, and software pipelines that connect the physical and virtual components of the experience.

The project is now expanding into an international research and performance collaboration connecting Blacksburg, Montreal, Galway, and Seattle, with future work exploring synchronized and networked performances across multiple locations.

For the New Music + Technology Festival, audiences will experience a live vocal and animatronic performance followed by an artist talk and behind the scenes presentation examining the creative process, robotic systems, XR technologies, and interdisciplinary collaboration behind Drosera Obscura.

Visitors to the Blacksburg campus Monday - Friday, 7 a.m. - 10 p.m. will need to display a parking permit, utilize the ParkMobile app, pay the daily charge for a pass, or pay for parking using an hourly meter. A range of parking options can be found here.

All campus parking, including along Alumni Mall, requires a parking permit from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., unless otherwise noted by signage.

If you are an individual with a disability and desire an accommodation, please contact performingarts@vt.edu at least 10 business days prior to the event.