Peixian Wu

Bio

My PhD title:

Walking the Psyche: Expanding the Poetics of Performative Virtual Architecture 

My PhD summary:

My research proposes “performative virtual architecture” as a practice-led framework for investigating how virtual space can operate as a poetic, affective, and performative medium within real-time game engines. While architectural phenomenology and cinematic theory have established space as a carrier of memory and affect, these traditions are largely grounded in fixed or pre-authored spatial media. They offer limited tools for analysing environments that are programmable, responsive, and authored through action. By contrast, real-time game engines enable spatial systems in which architecture is not only represented but actively composed, performed, and experienced in motion.

Situated at the intersection of architecture, film, game space, and performance research, the project examines virtual architecture as a time-based, intermedial practice. In this research, virtual architecture refers to environments that are designed and experienced in real-time engines through moving image as visual presentation. This includes both screen-based machinima and hybrid performance contexts that combine virtual and physical scenography. The game engine is treated as a procedural co-performer capable of generating spatial events, haptic atmospheres, temporal rhythms, and authored traversal. 

The need for this research is both academic and practical. Existing scholarship explains how digital spaces narrate or how systems perform, yet lacks a framework for understanding how spatial affect emerges through the act of designing and performing space in real time, particularly from the perspective of the designer-performer. In parallel, contemporary creative industries increasingly deploy game technologies to create spectacle or infrastructure, often overlooking questions of affect, subjectivity, and poetic dwelling. 

Rather than proposing a prescriptive design method, the research articulates how embodied traversal, dramaturgical tuning, and reflective documentation together constitute a mode of spatial authorship. It contributes an operative vocabulary and transferable framework for artists, designers, and researchers seeking to compose intermedial environments by treating them as lived, psychological, and performative spaces.