Jose Hopkins Brocq
External PhD Candidate
- Name
- J.A. Hopkins Brocq
- Telephone
- +31 71 527 2727
- j.a.hopkins.brocq@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Jose Hopkins Brocq is a PhD candidate at the Leiden Centre for the Arts in Society. His current research project, titled "Affective Gestures in VR: Reshaping the Human-Technology Interface," is funded by the Peruvian Ministry of Education’s PRONABEC program. "Affective Gestures in VR" investigates Virtual Reality’s potential to create embodied experiences by positioning users' gestures as central narrative components, thereby reshaping the phenomenological relationship between body and technology. Hopkins specializes in practice-based and critical writing research and combines approaches from new media arts and performance with insights from posthumanisms, particularly new materialisms and affect theory from post-colonial and queer perspectives. His expertise extends to understanding the bodily effects of media and poetic practices on public space and place-making across disciplines, working at the intersection of storytelling, community-based participation, and curatorial practices.
More information about Jose Hopkins Brocq
Fields of interests
- Gesture and movement in media production and analysis
- (Post)phenomenology and media-specific analysis
- Hybrid and somatic involvement in digital media
- Cybernetic and affective analysis of media as embodied interaction
- Post-colonial and queer perspectives on technology studies
- The work of Gloria Anzaldúa and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, especially approaches to mestizo and interculturality
- Participatory and interactive media and storytelling
- Interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary research
- Critical curatorial practices and museum studies
Research
|
"Affective Gestures in VR: Reshaping the Human-Technology Interface" explores how gestures in VR move beyond a functional and transparent role, becoming central to meaning-making and embodied experience. I am not the first to bring attention to this in interactive digital experiences. In 2009, through the analyses of Myron Kruege’s seminal piece Videoplace (1975), Simon Penny argued that much of the “new” media formal palette is the user’s body movements. He suggests the formal possibilities of including the body and its movements as part of the media experience’s artistic language. Following Penny, my project examines gesture as an embodied and interpretive phenomenon, integral to enacting/playing/interacting with/in VR. By thinking with VR art performances and installations such as Elele (2022), Of Songs for a Passerby (2023), Body of Mine (2023) and Free Our Head (2024), this research argues that gestures in VR serve a broader, non-representational purpose in creating meaning. Additionally, focusing on gestures as the object of study has important implications for how we theorise the body-technology relationship, as the body is now a part of the VR media experience. |
Grants and awards
2022 “Beca Generacion del Bicentenario” for PhD Research from the Ministry of Education – Peru.
2021 “Stimulierings Fonds Creative Industries Fund NL – Digital Culture Scheme,” starting grant for the project Documenting Affects: how to feel the past with VR.
2012 “FAE – PUCP,” stimulus grant for a research project” for the project Cuando toda línea recta es arco de un círculo infinito.
Curriculum Vitae
2022- ongoing PhD Candidate
Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) – Leiden University
2021 Media, Arts and Performance Studies (RMA Program)
Utrecht University – Utrecht, Netherlands
2018 Arts and Society (MA Program)
Utrecht University – Utrecht, Netherlands
2012 Fine Arts – Printmaking (BA-Hons Program)
Pontifical Catholic University of Peru – Lima, Peru
External PhD Candidate
- Faculty of Humanities
- Centre for the Arts in Society
- KG Moderne beeldende kunst