…

Immersive Conditions finished with a screening of video documentation of two immersive works by celebrated Canadian artist Char Davies, Osmose, from 1995, and her most recent work Ephémère. Both these pieces are sophisticated VR environments; sensors track the breathing and motion of the "immersant", who navigates through lush, translucent dreamscapes. In Osmose natural spaces — crystalline trees and ponds, layers of green ferns — are sandwiched between a substrate of computer code (the work's own code), and a textual cloud of philosophical and phenomenological quotations. Ephémère develops a similar aesthetic, now even richer, more luminous and dynamic; here we move again through forest and earth, but also, as in RAPT, inside a translucent body. Ephémère conveys an unusually somber mood; it seems that this is a grave, the dissolution of body into soil. This sense is reinforced upon learning that the work is dedicated to Davies' brother, killed in a car accident in 1988, and to her aunt, who died only days before the work's premiere. [2] According to the artist, the work addresses "the ephemerality of being, in terms of our fragile fleeting life spans as mortal beings embedded in a living flowing world" as well as "the symbolic correspondence between body and earth. [3]  Like Osmose, Ephémère is for Davies "a means of reaffirming our biological and psychological dependency on Nature."

Frances Dyson, in an acute analysis of Osmose, probes some of the contradictions within Davies' work. According to Dyson this lavish, painstakingly constructed virtual space ultimately aims to return us to the real, embodied experience of scuba diving; "Osmose functions best as a trailer for the deep sea". [4]  In the same way, Ephémère leads us through a lush, high-tech epiphany back to a primal theme; the transience of earthly, embodied life. A striking resonance appears between Davies' works and those of Cooper and Innocent; each of them deals explicitly with embodiment, and the dynamics of embodied life within virtual space. Strangely it is exactly the critical questions that these works raise which were absent from the day's discussion: what is the relationship between embodiment and immersion? Is virtual reality an elaborate artifice which is doomed to mirror its opposite — the thing it can never be — real, embodied experience? Does it constitute a new space for a kind of life, and if so, what kind? The VR-hype of the early 1990s provoked a highly critical reaction within new media theory, one which took immersive technologies to task over their culturally-inscribed representational structure, their neo-spiritual rhetoric, their Cartesian erasure of the body. Simon Penny's 1992 article "Virtual Reality as the End of the Enlightenment Project"  [5]is one example of this critique; the 1996 anthology Immersed in Technology [6] contains many others.

Immersive Conditions left me wondering what had become of this critique; has it been sidestepped for the sake of an exciting ride into future virtualities? Are we simply bored with it? The work of Davies and Cooper, and to some extent Innocent, demonstrates that the paradoxes of immersive technologies, in particular the issue of embodiment, remain key concerns for artists working in this medium. These are concerns that we should pause and consider before accepting the proposition that the future for art practice lies in virtual space.

Notes

1. Alessio Cavallaro in FutureScreen catalogue, dLux media arts 1998.


2. Matthew Mirapaul, "An Intense Dose of Virtual Reality", The New York Times, 9 July 1998. Available online at
http://www.nytimes.com/ library/tech/98/07/cyber/artsatlarge /09artsatlarge.html [last visited 1999]†


3. Char Davies, "Ephémère: Landscape, Earth, Body and Time in Immersive Virtual Space" available online at http://www.immersence.com


4. Frances Dyson, "Charged Havens" World Art No. 3 1996, 45


5. Simon Penny, "Virtual Reality as the End of the Enlightenment Project", available online at
http://www-art.cfa.cmu.edu/www-penny/texts/VR_Dia_.html [last visited May 2007]†


6. Mary Anne Moser and Douglas MacLeod (eds), Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments, MIT Press Cambridge, Mass, 1996.