The most advanced form of interactivity is hypermedia: virtual reality

Although sophisticated VR simulation technology was developed by the military during the Cold War, it was directed solely at the concept of a sedentary operator following the movement of a vehicle through a 3-D virtual world. Myron Kreuger, one of the artists who pioneered VR, commented that it is artists who have pushed farthest in the imaginary uses of the medium.

Figure 5.44.
Virtual reality gloves, circa 1994.

The sense that virtual reality was of fundamental importance came from artists who communicated it immediately to the public through their work. In addition, many aspects of virtual reality including full body participation, the idea of a shared telecommunications space, multi-sensory feedback, third-person participation, unencumbered approaches and the data glove all came from the art, not from the technical community.

Figure 5.45. Virtual reality headset, circa 1994.

These wired virtual reality sensor accoutrements contain the sensors which make visible to the viewer changes triggered by the body's movements within a specifically wired environment. (NASA)

Most artists attracted to work with virtual reality [37] as a medium want to create imaginative interactive environments where they can control all the objects or all the spatial coordinates and sound in order to achieve an aesthetic effect. Powerful computers are used to generate visual experience and to track body movements through the use of prosthetic devices such as data gloves, head-mounted displays and body-suits which encase the body in fiber-optic cabling. Fully immersed in a completely controlled artificial environment, the visual, aural, and tactile capabilities of the body become totally absorbed in following three-dimensional representations which are continuously modeled and tracked through computer monitoring of the body's every movement. Participants experience environments which seem to be located in three-dimensional real space. The effect is that of a technological invasion of the body's senses and a relocation of what can be seen and experienced to the realm of a synthetic private world severed from other potential observers. Jeffrey Shaw, artist-director of the Center for Media Arts (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, describes it:

Now with the mechanisms of the new digital technologies, the artwork can become itself a simulation of reality, an immaterial "cyberspace" which we can literally enter. Here the viewer is no longer consumer in a mausoleum of objects, rather he/she is traveler and discoverer in a latent space of audio visual information. In this temporal dimension the interactive artwork is each time restructured and re-created by the activity of the viewers.

A small band of artists [38] in Europe and North America have challenged the potential of virtual reality by exploring it as an imaginary space. Some project their "virtual Images" in space; some employ headgear connected to sensing devices which control the flow and placement of images within the space. There are no guidelines for these new kinds of work - no vocabulary, no blueprints - because the medium, not in existence until recently, has been approached by relatively few artists to create new works. It is a wide-open medium without boundaries. There is little critical writing about its use.

Char Davies, Seeds, from Ephémère, 1998

Digital image captured in real-time through head-mounted display during live immersive journey/performance.

Working with a team of engineers in the late 1980s to design the software program SoftImage, Canadian artist Char Davies began to imagine an interactive virtual experience for viewers where they could incorporate the intimate emotional territory of the body into an encounter with a virtual world. In her landscape paintings, Davies was interested in exploring the specific ways people encounter nature where the physical self rather than the conscious mind is in control. She began to build an immersive virtual space with this principle in mind, along with a sense of the floating poetics of space she wished to encompass in the work. In Ephémère, 1998 (Plate 3), the viewer participant is swathed in special wired suiting with wide-view headmount, data gloves and special sensors that enable a participant to navigate as a reflection of their own breath and body balance. This system is different from the conventional hand-oriented methods such as joystick, wand, track ball, or glove - which, according to Davies, tend to support a distanced and disembodied stance toward the world." In Osmose, she comments, participants experience an "intense feeling of realness and feelings of freedom coupled with emotional levels including euphoria or loss at the conclusion of the session." In addition, after becoming accustomed to the the work's breath and balance interface, and the experience of seeing and floating through things, most participants "relinquish desire for active doing' in favor of contemplative 'being' '." [39]

The many realms Davies creates in her virtual reality works are rich in abstract texture, color, and light effects which seem to facilitate awareness of one's own consciousness. The experience of being enveloped in the space she creates is akin to being inside a painting, that is moving with the direction of one's breathing. The work becomes a space for exploring the perceptual interplay between the self and the world. Davies comments: "the experience of seeing and floating through things, along with the work's reliance on breath (the interface) and balance, as well as solitary immersion, causes many participants to relinquish desire for active 'doing' in favor of comtemplative 'being'… I have come to believe that full-body immersion in an 'unusual' virtual environment can potentially lead to shifts in mental awareness. That this may be possible has many implications, some promising, some disturbing."

(Char Davies)

Brenda Laurel, Perry Hoberman, and Toni Dove were all invited in the period 1993-94 to create works produced through a one-of-a-kind artist-centered high-tech program at the Banff Center for the Arts supported by the Canadian government, where costly, complex equipment exists with the unusually knowledgeable staff necessary to build and operate it. The works are experimental, like upper-echelon scientific research, because of the specialized environment, and are not likely to be widely seen in the near future. The artists were invited to produce their works in a structure that became lab-like in its devotion to finding solutions to problems presented by the artists.

Figure 5.46
Jeffrey Shaw, Configuring the Cave, 1999

Computer-based video installion utilizing the CAVE technology.

Produced at the ZKM Center for Visual Media with Leslie Stuck, Agnes Hegedus, Berndt Linterrnan. Collection of the NH InterCommunication Center, Tokyo, Japan.

This complex work assumes a set of pictorial procedures to identify various paradigmatic conjunctions of the body and space. It uses the CAVE technology's stereographic virtual reality environment with contiguous projections on three walls and the floor. The user interface is a near life-size wooden puppet that is formed like the prosaic artist's mannequin. Viewers handle the figure, moving its body parts to dynamically control real-time transformations of the digitally generated imagery and sound compositions. The work is constituted by seven differentiated pictorial domains which can be explored through moving the limbs of the puppet interface. The experience of the work brings up questions about relationships between physical and conceptual relationships and exposes the fragile relations of the surrogate body now located in a measureless dimensional space of forms and texts.

(Jeffrey Shaw and ZKM)

Artist Brenda Laurel is drawn to VR because she believes that adults, unlike children, need a certain anonymity or ability to change hats to mask out reality in order to play. They need enhanced props and tend to like the electronic "smart costumes" they must wear in order to explore the interesting dramatic potential of the immersive narrative environments she creates. She believes in a mixture of freedom and constraint in her work. She calls VR costumes "prostheses for the imagination." Laurel observes that "the relationship between human and machine has ceased to be purely technical and has entered the ancient realm of theater." [40]

On entering the exhibition space of Laurel's Placeholder, participants find themselves in an environment featuring two ten-foot circles surrounded by river rocks. On donning the head-mount display, participants first experience darkness and then find themselves located inside a "virtual" cave where creatures - a spider, a crow, a snake, and a fish - talk, and seem to entice the visitor toward their locations as petroglyphs on the cave wall. On approaching each, the participants "become" the creature, assuming its physical features and experience spatialized distortion of their own voice through the HMD (head-mounted device) speakers. A character called 'The Goddess" offers advice, although her voice, unlike the other sounds, is not spatialized. To create the work, Laurel collaborated with Rachel Strickland. They shot video footage near Banff National Park of a natural cave, a waterfall, a sulphur hotspring, and a fantastic rock formation. They digitized their images, added high-quality spatialized sound, and created simplified character animation of the creatures.

In Perry Hoberman's Bar Code Hotel (1994), viewers see objects within a real space juxtaposed against 3-D representations of virtual objects projected in a virtual space. The virtual ones can be controlled interactively by the participants acting from their position in the real space. Hoberman believes that there should be a "one-to-one predictable relationship between a user's action and a system's response. It should work like a light switch… With interactivity, it's better to have nothing to say than to try to say something. It's better for meaning to come out of the interaction rather than controlling the experience." [41] This model is favored by many contemporary artists over older ones based on choice modes or interactive narratives. Hoberman feels that the best scenario for interaction is not a model which interrupts the action by offering choice and interactive stories but rather one which initiates action in a program structure which is totally responsive. When interactive technology is combined with three-dimensional virtual reality modeling, the viewer can be projected and immersed into the narrative space itself, far from the confines of the computer or film screen - more like an environmental theater. Experimenting with collaborator Michael McKenzie at Banff's Art and Virtual Environments program, multimedia artist Toni Dove [42] in 1994 created Archaeology of a Mother Tongue, which involved a theatersized rear-projection screen with interactive computer graphics, video, and 3-D scrims for animated slide projections. In an article published in Leonardo, she writes about her experience as an artist in creating an interactive virtual reality Immersion environment:

I approached the concept of interactivity with some resistance, wondering why I should replace intellectual challenge with multiple choice … I saw it as more of an extension of the passive television metaphor than an engagement with options that have substantial ramifications. What I discovered was a world of possibilities that I feel I have barely begun to explore. [43]

What she finally decided on was a system for producing a potentially vast number of nonlinear, unpredictable responses based on her interest in the alternative concepts of immersion. Contrary to film, the experience offers a variety of entry points, a different, fuller sense of real time passing, particularly when it is decided on by the viewer. For her, the potential of an immersive interactive environment was to create a work that is more fluid than lines, a multilayered structure which accessed text, both the written and the spoken, with visual elements and responsive sound. She describes the immersion experience as "a movie sprung free from the screen … In film, time passes with a cut. VR is continuous space." In virtual reality, it is possible to have multiple streams of different media bombard the viewer in a "field of constantly changing experience."

…

Notes

37. Support for the groundwork development of virtual reality technology originally grew out of a complex of military needs (flight simulators, computer animation, robotic image recognition, ray tracing, texture mapping, motion control), and the video games entertainment industry


38. I am indebted to Myron Kreuger for this note.
Computer-controlled responsive environments date back to the 1969 work by Dan Sandin and Myron Kreuger at the University of Wisconsin around the same time that the PULSA group at Yale led by Patrick Clancy created large-scale outdoor environments. Aaron Marcus created an interactive symbolic computer graphic environment in the early 1970s. Through a grant from NEA, Dan Sandin, Tom Defanti, and Gary Sayers at the University of Illinois invented the data glove. Mike McGreevey was involved in the original development of the head-mounted display used at NASA. Early development involved the work of many artists, especially musicians Jaron Lanier and Tom Zimmerman.


39. Char Davies, "Changing Space: Virtual Reality as an Arena for Embodied Being" in Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, eds, Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (New York: Norton, 2002).


40. Quoted in Myron W. Kreuger, 'The Artistic Origins of Virtual Reality," Siggraph Visual Proceedings (New York: ACM, 1993).


41. Quoted in Barbara Bliss Osborne, "Write on the Money," The Independent, January/February, 1994.



42. Prior to her work at Banff, Toni Dove worked with multiple computer-programmed slide projection and video projections controlled by laserdiscs on 3-D scrims. her performance/installation works included sound and text



43. Toni Dove, "Theater Without Actors: Immersion and Response in Installation," Leonardo 27 (94) (1994): 281-7.