Jose Hopkins Brocq
Jose Hopkins is a practice-based and critical writing researcher working between Utrecht (Netherlands) and Lima (Peru). He's currently a PhD candidate at the Leiden Centre for the Arts in Society. In his work, he combines approaches from digital arts and performance with insights from different post-humanisms like new materialisms and affect theory. He dialogues with these frameworks navigating through different media and narrative structures in his work.
Currently, his research focuses on the affordances of different technologies and the various affects that emerge from and with them. Namely, he is working with VR technologies and cooking performances.
Concerning his interest in VR, his research delves into this technology’s possibilities to produce sensuous and bodily experiences and how to apply them in processes of documenting and archive-making. He is interested in developing a functional conceptual vocabulary to approach VR experiences as primarily emotion and affect-based technology. Likewise, he finds interest in the affective and emotional components of cooking and eating experiences. Namely, how do bodily conditions affect and emerge from the “performance” of cooking and eating, and how can we make sense of them. He has been researching how different elements in the performance of cooking and eating can be approached and used as part of a narrative structure.
Hopkins has experience researching how to understand the bodily effects of media and poetic practices on public space configuration and place-making from different disciplines. He works from the intersection between digital media, storytelling (or storyfinding), community-based participation and curatorial practices.
