Art

Authors: Ninad Jog and Claudio Esperanca

Virtual Reality can be used either as a novel medium to create interactive and surrealistic art forms or as an instrument that takes the user on a guided tour of existing conventional art. Surrealist artists benefit most from it.

As a novel medium, it has limitless creative potential bacause every shape, space, sound and time can be bent as the user wishes. Just as multimedia heralds the mixing of different media on a computer screen, virtual reality art proclaims an integration of hitherto disparate art forms like paintings, music and moving pictures. Since virtual reality permits scenarios that violate physical laws, its art will let users experience fantasies that have been the stuff of science fiction to date.

Being a nascent technology, virtual reality art is still under the control of technologists rather than artists - a situation that will change as the technology matures. In the non-virtual reality world, scientific data visualization has already established a niche as an art form in its own right, and virtual reality promises to take it further. Walking on the surface of Mars (recreated as a virtual environment on earth) will be both a scientific endevaour and an artistic experience.

Virtual art is at once a technology, a medium and a concept.

• A cauldron for integrating painting, film, sculpture and literature with the performing arts like music and theater.
• A meta-medium that simultaneously encompasses myraid styles - surrealist, cubist, revivalist, religious and postmodern.
• By its nature, it is an experience in which art viewers can co-create their experiences.

Several works of virtual art have been created - here are some examples.

• A virtual theater with two participants in a kabuki play see their own representations on the screen as graphical images. By selecting different poetry associated with the play, they can select different endings.
• The Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) at the University of Illinios at Urbana-Champaign has a Fractal Explorer application that enables participants to explore three-dimensional fractals and their chaotic attractors by moving around them, changing their shapes and colors and displaying them with different graphical primitives (for example, triangles and squares). Fractals are mathematical representations of repititive elements of compound events or objects. Viewers can wave a wand to rotate the fractal and view other sides of it or alter it completely by changing the attractors it was built on (DeFanti 1993).
• Using Sense8's VR tools, artist Robert McFadden has created a piece called 'Picture Yourself In Fiction' - a vast empty box with no top or bottom in which the inner and outer panels of a floating cube are covered with scanned photographs of the artist's body. As the participant passes near the panels, digitized samples of his poetry are triggered and audibly played. Space itself distorts and loops back on the participant as they move about. (Pimentel 1993).
• Another example of virtual art is the creation of Piet Mondrian titled 'Composition With Lime', which appears as a conventional 2-D painting, but falls apart and mutuates into a 3-D sculpture when the participant flies around it.

There are lots of possibilities - this era is just at the dawn.

References and Suggested Readings:

[DeFANTI 93] DeFanti, Sandin and Cruz-Neira, "A 'room' with a 'view', IEEE Spectrum, October 1993, pp. 30-33

Internet: Newsgroup sci.virtual-worlds' Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list.