Dania Khan

Poiesis

Poiesis: A Speculative WebXR Experience for Identity Dissolution and Post-Capitalist Self-Actualization Poiesis is an immersive speculative design experience that asks a single, deceptively simple question: who are you when everything the world calls you is taken away? Built as a WebXR environment running natively in the Meta Quest browser and any desktop browser, it is a single-file experience requiring no installation, no account, and no prior knowledge, only a willingness to answer four questions honestly. The name comes from Aristotle. Poiesis is the act of bringing something into being, not the production of an object, but the emergence of something that did not previously exist. Every time a visitor completes the experience, something is brought into being that was not there before: a self, briefly, without its labels. The experience works as follows. A visitor enters a three-dimensional metaverse environment, a space that deliberately signals non-reality, that could only exist inside a machine. Inside this world, four questions appear in sequence. Each one strips away a further layer of performed identity: Introduce yourself — without using your name, profession, nationality, religion, ethnicity, or race. Stripped of every role the world gave you — what do you actually love? If no one needed anything from you, and you needed nothing from anyone — what would you make, build, or become? What kind of world would you inhabit if you were truly free to shape your own reality? The sequence is deliberate. It moves from deconstruction to reconstruction dismantling the performed self before creating space for the authentic one. After the fourth answer, Poiesis speaks. An AI companion reads all four responses and delivers a reflection in two parts: a poetic account of who the visitor is beneath their labels, and a concrete, personalized practice for transcending into a more self-actualized reality. The text arrives character by character, like something being written in real time, before finally resting in silence.

“I have been thinking about this project for longer than I have been making it. The question at its centre — who are you when your name, your job, your nationality, your religion, your ethnicity, and your race are all removed — is one I have been living with for years before I knew how to turn it into a design proposition. It is a question that comes from being someone whose identity is regularly organized by others before she has the chance to speak for herself. It comes from being told, in ways both explicit and ambient, that certain categories precede you: that you are legible as a brown woman, as a Muslim, as a designer, as a student, before you are legible as a person. Poiesis is my attempt to design a space where that precedence is suspended, even briefly, even artificially, and to ask what might be found in that suspension.”