A moving image artwork illuminates a large projection screen, a sci-fi narrative begins to unfold at a meditative pace in high-contrast black and white images. The University of Lincoln campus is reimagined as belonging to a future institute capable of sending an expedition into space to record life on far-flung planets. The expeditionists travel using digital avatars, but the attempt to gain knowledge of alien worlds is rendered complex, the aliens meld with the avatars, reversing the travellers’ journey and, in so doing, create posthuman life back on Earth.

The artwork fictionalises a real psychology experiment, conducted at the University of Lincoln, which examined body image, the ways people perceive their own bodies and how these perceptions are impacted by social norms. We asked participants to imagine living in a body very different to their own, an alien creature from another planet. Our aim was to discover new therapies for treating those with negative feelings about their body’s shape and size.