NEW BONES
NEW BONES is an immersive XR installation dedicated to "those of us broken enough to grow new bones” (joy james, 2023). Co-created by Clémentine Bedos, an Afropean transmedia artist, in dialogue with Jamal Sterrett, a Scottish-Jamaican Asperger self-taught performance artist based in Nottingham, Eunjo Lee, a London-based South Korean 3D artist, and Mohammed Rowe, a London-born Jamaican sound artist, who composed the original ambisonic soundscape. The work plants decolonial imaginaries into the future through embodied world-building, asking: what new aesthetic and political forms emerge when brokenness becomes a ground for radical transformation?
Installation sketch of NEW BONES: a 12-screen video wall with ambisonic sound and haptic seating, immersing audiences in an embodied field of perception. Each of the 12 screens shows a different viewpoint from Jamal’s body, captured through motion capture. His joints, skin, and limbs become lenses, turning the body itself into a moving camera. Audiences experience the virtual world not from a single fixed gaze, but through a constellation of shifting, fractured perspectives from within the dancer’s body.
Intervention
NEW BONES aims to fragment, disrupt, and queer spatial perception in immersive environments, breaking apart VR’s dominant stereoscopic, head-centric perception—rooted in militarised, colonial, and ableist regimes of sight. In its place, NEW BONES offers a neurodivergent, full-body sensorial perspective, shaped by Jamal’s experience of reality as a hypersensorial, affective field. Immersive media becomes a terrain to archive choreographies of resistance and cultivate fugitive modes of seeing, sensing, and being.
Early export from NEW BONES (shoulder viewpoint): one of many distributed camera perspectives mapped across the dancer’s body. The environment has since evolved, and other viewpoints reveal more of Jamal’s moving body within the frame.
In most virtual worlds, the game engine camera acts as a "neutral/objective" eye—floating, detached, and shaped by Western traditions of optics and control. NEW BONES overturns this by turning the camera into a body: the body of Jamal Sterrett, a neurodivergent bruk up dancer whose movement transforms perception itself. This shift grounds virtual experience in idiosyncratic, fractured, and elemental ways of moving, opening XR to Afro-diasporic, animist, and neurodivergent ways of knowing.
Turning the game engine camera into the body of a neurodivergent bruk up dancer has four radical implications for how we understand virtual perception:
1. Breaking the default perspective in gaming/VR
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Normally, the game engine camera = a neutral, “objective” eye, usually modeled on Western optics: linear perspective, single point of view, often militarized (FPS shooters, surveillance, drones).
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By turning the camera into the body of a bruk up dancer, you disrupt that neutrality: vision no longer floats, detached, but is grounded in the body’s singular, lived movements.
2. Centering neurodivergence as a way of seeing/being
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Jamal’s bruk up style is shaped by Asperger’s stimming movements — repetition, vibration, rupture.
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This means the camera is no longer “smooth” or “standardized”: it inherits his neurodivergent rhythms.
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So the virtual world is perceived through a hypersensorial, affective, non-linear lens — showing neurodivergence not as pathology, but as creative epistemology.
3. Honoring diasporic / subaltern knowledge systems
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Bruk up emerged from Jamaican and Brooklyn street culture as a way of embodying brokenness, transforming precarity into style and power.
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It often draws on animist logics: mimicking elemental forces, animals, spirits.
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Embedding that into the game engine means virtual perception is re-rooted in Afro-diasporic and animist worldviews instead of colonial optics.
4. Reframing technology itself
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The camera ceases to be a surveillance tool or eye-machine.
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It becomes a living body-field: joints, breath, skin, vibration — all sites of vision.
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This reclaims XR technology as a medium not of extraction but of embodied resistance and world-making.
It’s saying: this is how the world looks, feels, and moves when seen from the margins— and that vision can reconfigure technology itself!
Early export from NEW BONES (six-screen montage): multiple distributed viewpoints of Jamal Sterrett’s performance. Skin textures not yet applied.
Process
Jamal Sterrett’s improvised bruk up performance, motion-captured at the Centre for Creative and Immersive eXtended Realities (CCIXR), University of Portsmouth.
This reorientation of vision is not metaphorical but architectural. NEW BONES uses full-body motion capture and game engines to create a poly-corporeal POV system: a distributed camera architecture where virtual cameras are mapped across Jamal’s avatar—his joints and skin becoming both lens and sensor, his limbs a kinetic camera armature. The result is an “embodied camera constellation” shown across 12 monitors, immersing audiences not in a single, disembodied gaze, but in a fractured grid of shifting perspectives from within the moving body.
By embedding bruk up into motion capture, NEW BONES brings this radical movement language into a technological system that has historically excluded and discriminated against these same communities. This becomes an act of somatic decolonisation: reprogramming both machine vision and the socialised codes of the body, by inserting marginalised ways of moving and knowing into dominant infrastructures of VR and gaming. In this way, the work innovates not only at the level of perspective (from vision to body, from gaze to breath), but also at the level of cultural politics—reclaiming technology as a site where diasporic knowledge systems can thrive, unsettle norms, and reimagine how worlds are built.
Scroll of the motion capture code from Jamal Sterrett’s bruk up performance. Each line describes the hierarchy of bones and positions used by game engines to reconstruct the moving body. Here, Jamal’s fractured movement reconfigures that code from within, breaking open the machine’s logic.
Motion-captured at the Centre for Creative and Immersive eXtended Realities (CCIXR), University of Portsmouth, the work centres on Jamal’s twenty-minute improvised performance in bruk up—a post-dub style emerging from Jamaican street culture, evolving in Brooklyn’s underground scene, and now practiced worldwide, from London to Russia.
Bruk up—literally “broken up” in Jamaican Patois—draws from Afro-diasporic animist traditions, using broken, disjointed gestures to deconstruct and reassemble the self after colonisation. Rooted in finding one’s singular way of moving, bruk up embraces brokenness and disability as sources of creativity. In Jamal’s practice, his stimming movements naturally fold into the style’s fractured vocabulary.
Different stages of the motion capture process: Jamal’s performance driving a generic avatar in real time, alongside his fully rendered avatar within the virtual environment.
Sound
Sound in NEW BONES is not background but another field of rupture and recomposition. The work features two interwoven tracks: the soundpiece to which Jamal dances, and a second layer of processed breathscapes drawn from his performance, diffused ambisonically throughout the space.
The original composition by London-born Jamaican sound artist Mohammed Rowe fuses noise with polymetric rhythmic patterns. His process draws on mathematical sequences found in nature—Fibonacci spirals, golden ratios, prime numbers—manifesting musically as complex polyrhythms. These syncopations are unpredictable yet relational, echoing how African drumming traditions use rhythm not only for social communication but as a dialogue with natural and sacred forces. This numerological approach resonates with bruk up’s fractured logic: both reconfigure inherited structures, turning disruption into form, and brokenness into a generative ground.
Together, Jamal’s breath and Mohammed’s soundscape transform the gallery into a living lung, a space where vibration, rhythm, and respiration bind body and world.
Arc of Experience
Set within a virtual cremation ground, this performance unfolds in a space already charged with liminality and transformation. In many traditions, the cremation ground is a threshold space where endings become beginnings, where potent spirits are invoked and renewal takes root. Within NEW BONES, it becomes the perfect terrain for bruk up’s emancipatory gestures—an incantatory ground for healing and reinvention, where seeds of ancestralfuturity are sown and new worlds take form. Emerging from the ruins of colonialism and climate collapse, NEW BONES affirms the creative force at our core and our agency to reconfigure oppressive systems.
Jamal’s avatar dances in a virtual cremation ground—a space of liminality and transformation—before the twin disks of sun and moon, the watching eyes of the sky.
The installation runs as a 20-minute loop structured around a 24-hour arc, moving from sunrise to sunset before beginning again. For the majority of the piece, each screen shows a different embodied viewpoint from Jamal’s body. In the closing three minutes, the 12 screens converge to present his full dancing figure, creating a cyclical in-and-out rhythm between immersion (emic perspective) and external view (etic perspective).
Installation
NEW BONES is best experienced in a dedicated, self-contained room where an ambisonic sound system can immerse the audience in Jamal’s breath, recorded during his performance. The breath fills the gallery, circulating in an infinite loop that echoes the shape of lungs, enveloping viewers as they encounter the multi-screen installation.
Best presented in a space of approx. 6m × 6m (20ft × 20ft) or larger, allowing ~4m viewing distance from the video wall to the seating area and additional space behind for audience circulation.
Comfortable seating—beanbags or cushions fitted with transducers and headphones—extends the experience into the body. Low-frequency vibrations from Mohammed Rowe’s soundscape resonate through the seating, while the layered soundtrack plays through headphones, creating an intimate yet full-bodied encounter with the work.
By rendering the exhibition space into an interface of breath, movement, rhythm, and rupture, the work offers a cinematic ritual where brokenness becomes a strategy for healing and world-making, asking what becomes possible when those logics are broken—so something else may emerge in their place.
Adaptable to LED wall, projection, or smaller configuration with headphones if required. Minimum adaptable footprint: 3m × 3m if required.
The piece is adaptable and can also be displayed as an LED wall or projected onto a large screen or wall. This format reduces the intended sense of physicality and sculptural presence but enables the work to be showcased more widely.
Team of collaborators
Clémentine Bedos (they/them) is a UK-based transdisciplinary artist whose research-led practice explores the interrelated phenomena of mind, body, and consciousness within our present dominant modes of identity. Drawing from a diverse ancestry (Haitian, Gypsy, Kabyle, French), they create multi-sensual ritual performances that weave the diasporic, ancestral, and spiritual with extended reality (XR) as a creolised form of resistance. Using this mixed apparatus, they aim to disrupt hegemonic technoscientific regimes and decolonise modern(ist) relationship with images. Their work invites a reorientation of aesthetic focus inward-into the body, a divine instrument of perception and karmic archive-to reclaim inner visuality as a site of emancipation and nonduality.
Eunjo Lee (she/her) is a South Korean artist and filmmaker based in London, working with 3D moving images. Her practice explores the interconnectedness of humans, nature, and objects, reinterpreting archetypal motifs to construct contemporary digital mythologies.
Lee primarily works with Unreal Engine, pushing its visual and technical boundaries to expand interactive world-building. Lee has held a solo exhibition at Niru Ratnam Gallery, where she is represented, and was commissioned for her first institutional solo show in 2025 as part of Goldsmiths CCA's Episodes series. She graduated from the Ruskin MFA and won the Mansfield-Ruddock Prize in 2024.
Jamal Sterrett (he/him) is a Scottish-Jamaican performance artist whose self-taught practice draws on bruk up, flex’n, ballet, and improvised movement. Working with heightened sensitivity as an artist with Asperger’s, Sterrett channels stimming and vibratory states into a movement language that is both meditative and elemental. His improvisations respond to the sensory and affective qualities of site-specific environments, transforming his body into a conduit between inner and outer worlds. Rooted in diasporic and Afro-diasporic styles, his practice reveals the paradigms of space while opening pathways for visceral, spiritual, and transformative encounter.
Mohammed Rowe's practice explores the intersection of sound, technology, and sensory experiences, to connect people and spaces. His work spans interactive installations, film, theatre, and live performance, fostering immersive, multisensory experiences. Inspired by urban rhythms and found sounds, he crafts participatory soundscapes that transcend sensory boundaries, encouraging shared understanding and curiosity. By merging physical and digital realms, Rowe engages audiences in innovative ways, responding to an ever-changing world. His work provokes reflection on the relationship between sound and human experience, cultivating deeper connections within diverse communities through creativity and technological exploration.
Partners
