Özbilge investigates the conditioning of the human body as it enters extended reality, tracing how the contemporary post-digital paradigm has come to inhabit, discipline, and recode embodied experience. The body that enters XR is never neutral, nor is it free. It is already trained by spatial, cultural, and technological systems, carrying histories of discipline, habits, rhythms, fears, desires, and patterns of attention. Foucault conceptualizes this through the ‘docile body’. Our behavior and movements are shaped by visible as well as invisible herders. Long embedded in architecture, urban planning, institutions, and cultural norms, these forces are now joined by invisible opaque systems of Orwellian technological governance, such as screens, navigation tools (GPS), interfaces, platforms, and XR. Embodied movement, in this sense, is political. Power does not only repress bodies; it organizes them, teaching them where to go, how to behave, and how to inhabit space. Can we, as artists, reclaim our 6DoF, emancipate our phygital bodies, and repurpose movement in XR in order to create humanitarian narratives?
Sine Özbilge is a Belgium-based multidisciplinary visual artist, filmmaker, and immersive media practitioner working across moving image, games, and extended reality. She lectures at the animation faculty of LUCA School of Arts and is currently conducting a PhD at RITCS. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of the “docile body,” her research investigates how spatial and technological systems condition embodied experiences in extended reality. Her transdisciplinary artistic practice explores cyberfeminism, technologically mediated subjectivity, the subconscious, post-net aesthetics, and digital artefacts. Moving across disciplinary and material boundaries, Özbilge creates hybrid visual worlds that extend virtual environments into physical manifestations of the digital. Her practice has been presented across an extensive range of international venues and festivals, including the Berlinale, Ars Electronica, BFI, SIGGRAPH, SXSW, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Sharjah Art Foundation, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, ARTE Court-Circuit, and Denver Digerati.
