Becoming Dragon (2008) questions the one-year requirement of ‘Real Life Experience’ that transgender people must fulfill in order to receive Gender Confirmation Surgery, and asks if this could be replaced by one year of ‘Second Life Experience’ to lead to Species Reassignment Surgery. For the performance, I lived for 365 hours immersed in the online 3D environment of Second Life with a head mounted display, only seeing the physical world through a video feed, and used a motion capture system to map my movements into Second Life. The installation included a stereoscopic projection for the audience. A Puredata patch was used to process my voice to create a virtual dragon’s voice, which can be heard in the video.

During the year of research and development of this project, I began my real life hormone replacement therapy and wrote poetry and prose about the experience which was included in the performance.

Becoming Dragon Redux (2018), was presented at the Vector Festival in Montreal. The performance included a reperformance of the poems from the original Becoming Dragon, with an updated dragon avatar.