Cripping Up uses virtual reality to immerse audiences in Meg Fozzard’s lived experience as a wheelchair user where participants inhabit each reconstructed scene of  what should be a simple journey for someone able bodied becomes an odyssey. The work integrates real events from Meg’s life with interactive elements that evoke the physical and emotional barriers disabled people encounter daily.

 

Volumetric capture will be used to record a performer playing “old Meg” (Meg before becoming disabled). Rather than striving for realism, we will embrace the semi-transparent, insubstantial quality that volumetric capture often produces, using it as a creative feature to distinguish this figure from Meg’s present-day embodiment.

 

A key principle is “cripping the tech”: taking aspects of Meg’s disability and accurately synthesising them in VR to foster embodied understanding. At specific moments, participants will be invited to attempt actions—such as putting on shoes—while the system deliberately misaligns the controllers to mimic Meg’s involuntary limb movements.We aim to enhance this with hand tracking and a wheelchair rigged as a controller, allowing participants to physically propel themselves through the experience as Meg would.