Bridging Connections / Ecology of Presence

Bridging Connections began as the research spine for Bouillabaisse 2.0 XR, an experiment in how creative practice might be built from care, consent, and sensory sovereignty.

The early framework, Access Ecology, explored what inclusion might mean if it were built into the architecture of making itself. But as the research deepened, a crucial shift emerged.

Access implies adjustment, a way to get in.
This practice has never been about getting in; it has always been about being in - inhabiting, belonging, perceiving, and exchanging through many sensory routes.

That recognition gave rise to an Ecology of Presence: a living system where the focus moves from accommodation to sensory sovereignty, relational equity, and multimodal presence.

Presence here is not a fixed state but a felt geometry of encounter,  the changing form that emerges when people, materials, and atmospheres meet.
It is spatial, somatic, and relational: a choreography of attention that reconfigures itself with every participant and every choice.

At its heart lies the Dramaturgy of Presence, a practice that shapes conditions rather than scripts.
Each element, light, rhythm, gesture, texture, silence, becomes an invitation, an affordance for relation.
Participants choose their own sensory route; whichever sense opens first becomes the beginning.

This is equity as parity of experience, designing with, not for, creating worlds that can be lived inside, where perception itself becomes collaboration.

Access once framed participation as adjustment or entry.

The Ecology of Presence reframes it as being-within, how we apprehend, orient, and relate through the senses.

It asks how creation can honour sensory sovereignty and the right to choose which sense, or combination of senses, becomes the doorway to experience.

Presence, for me, has a geometry, a felt geometry of encounter.
It’s the shape that forms when people, materials, and atmospheres meet: spatial, somatic, relational.
The work of design or dramaturgy is to tune that geometry, to create conditions of belonging that shift and adapt with every participant.

Presence includes what we perceive through sight, sound, and touch - and also through movement: the body’s dialogue with distance, effort, rhythm, balance, resistance, and pause.
Mobility itself is a sensory intelligence; it shapes how we know space and belonging.

In design theory there’s a word, affordance - what a thing allows you to do.
A door affords opening, a button affords pressing, a texture affords touch.
In the same way, each sensory element, sound, light, rhythm, silence, carries an affordance for relation: an invitation to enter.

The question is not how to make experiences “accessible,” but how to make them liveable, how to build worlds that people can dwell inside through whichever sense opens first.

This is the work that excites me now: not access as a checklist, but presence as a shared ecology.
A field where perception itself becomes collaboration, and art is something we inhabit together, in all our different ways of being alive.

In an Ecology of Presence, equity becomes parity of experience, not after-the-fact adjustment.

It is designing with, not for; creating conditions where agency, preference, and need co-exist without hierarchy.

Belonging arises through relation and the freedom to choose how to be present.