In "Osmose," one of virtual reality's first feature-length works of art, Char Davies presents a complex, enveloping space that rejects "masculinist" hard edges and conquest tropes.

Scrim shadow of an "immersant" (user) with VR headpiece and interface vest.

In 1993 the Guggenheim Museum Soho heralded the "emerging medium" of virtual reality (VR) with a week-long exhibition of works displayed mostly on conventional computer monitors. Since then the developing art of VR has been virtually invisible to the public eye. This low profile is largely the function of radically limited access. With the notable exceptions of a now-defunct government-funded project at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, and the ongoing artist-residencies program of the ZKM/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, opportunities for artists to experiment with this costly medium are few. Fewer still are the exhibition spaces that have the financial resources or the technological expertise to support this work.

Consequently, Char Davies's recent exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal, marked a significant moment in VR's entry into the art-culture mainstream. The former painter, now director of visual research for SoftImage, Inc., a leading software company, showed a single work: Osmose, a fully immersive, three dimensional computer-graphics environment driven by the Rolls Royce of the hardware industry, a Silicon Graphics Onyx reality engine. Users (or "immersants," as the artist prefers) experienced the piece one at a time, using a head-mounted display and a black leather interface device that looked something like a chic life vest. This apparatus allowed users to navigate the virtual world scuba-style. Breathing in, users "rose"; exhaling, they descended. Point of view was defined by controlling body balance and the direction of the head-mount. The user's movements also triggered effectively spatialized sound intended to be subliminally recognizable as human voice samples.

Ground level clearing with central tree.
[Char Davies, Tree Pond, from Osmose, 1995] †

[Digital frame captured in real-time
through head-mounted display during
live performance.] †

And what did users see? Osmose is actually several worlds linked together. Users entered its terrain via an architectonic grid, rendered in wire frame as the girder-skeleton of an information-age cathedral. From this perspectival matrix users passed into a forest animated by shifting constructivist planes of photo-scanned foliage textures. Further exploration led one to a clearing where an enormous tree was rooted in a graphic "underworld" representing the computer code on which the piece was built. Users could also soar into an atmosphere afloat with texts—various and philosophically inclined—the artist used as source material.

Entrance grid to the forest terrain.
[Char Davies, Forest grid, from Osmose, 1995] †

[Digital frame captured in real-time
through head-mounted display during
live performance.] †

From a developmental point of view, Osmose is remarkable for several reasons. First, it is a "feature-length" VR production, complex enough to explore for sustained periods of time. Secondly, Davies has found a fairly satisfactory solution to the problem of installing a headmount display work in a traditional museum setting. Wired-in users were screened from voyeuristic eyes behind a scrim that turned them, via their silhouettes, into virtual performers. Others followed the experience vicariously, through a live video output shown in stereoscopic projection in a darkened gallery. Here, the resolution of the piece seemed tantalizingly good, thus encouraging many users to expect Osmose under the helmet would be as crisp as the VR sequences faked for such Hollywood films as Disclosure. Alas, not so. The gap between the hype and the reality of VR is wide indeed, tending to obscure the solid technical improvements that have been made in the past few years, with more projected for the immediate future.

The subterranean world with rocks, root systems and a stream.
[Char Davies, Subterranean Earth,
from Osmose, 1995] †

[Digital frame captured in real-time
through head-mounted display during
live performance.] †

Osmose also demonstrates the dominance in VR of the spatial metaphor, which is frequently underpinned by a narrative structure that emphasizes a journey or travel as the primary mode of interaction. The work avoids, however, the "masculinist" preoccupation with tropes of penetrating or mastering space common to VR developed for entertainment applications, which are typically based on video games. Instead, Osmose promotes a sense of envelopment and fluidity that I heard several users describe (pace Luce Irigaray) as feminine. An overview of VR to date—and a disheartening percentage of all "new media" work, for that matter—suggests that postmodernist critiques of representation and cultural politics are only just starting to trickle down into the collective consciousness of the technoscenti.

Visually Osmose is especially remarkable and completely unlike any other VR I've experienced. Using software she helped develop, Davies has created truly lovely layerings and drifts of luminous color, with nary a hard edge in sight. (The exception, perhaps, is that tree, which in fact appears more crystalline than organic.) This very loveliness, serene and undemanding, is probably the most courageous (and, in my view, the most problematic) aspect of the work: it risks being dismissed as so much new-age utopian rhetoric of the sort still in vogue among some of the cyberset. Many users did report feelings of tranquility and a deepened sense of connection—to their bodies, to an inner self, nature, or the cosmos, variously. I fought first hyperventilation (I didn't distinguish myself at diving, either), then cynicism: some parts of Osmose could have been produced by Disney—for example, the twinkling light particles that appear and "play" with the user. (Shades of Tinkerbell.) But I was sorry when the automatic program shutoff, deemed necessary for audience traffic control, ejected me from Davies's virtual universe. Each time it is reloaded, Osmose is a new living space. I wanted more—which may or may not mean the work is successful on its own ecologically inflected terms.

In the context of the VR scene, Osmose is a breakthrough work, founded on a genuine artistic vision. Davies plans an extensive tour for the piece, which she considers to be in-progress (after Montreal, it was shown at Ricco Maresca Gallery in New York). It will be interesting to see how other artists, given the chance, respond to Osmose's example of an alternative visual vocabulary for VR.