FW: SIGGRAPH (part 2)
Kevin Goldsmith (unitcirc@netcom.com)
Sat, 1 Jul 1995 14:50:55 -0700 (PDT)
> PANELIST STATEMENTS:
>
>
> CHRISTIAN GREUEL
>
> We hear the talk of endless technological revolutions. We are surrounded
> by high-tech gadgetry that does our bidding. Yet what does all of this
> magnificent machinery really offer us? Does progress in fact exist? And
> if so, what is it actually worth without substantial content?
>
> This discussion panel is addressing the current state of aesthetics in
> the virtual environment by focusing on the roles that tools have played
> in artistic communities of the past and how virtual technologies will
> undoubtedly affect their future.
>
> The beginning of history shows human beings using naturally-made pigments
> to draw images on cave walls, allowing them to represent their experiences
> to others. Through tomorrow's technology, we may find ourselves projecting
> our very thoughts into the space around us in order to do exactly the same.
> The purpose of the aesthetic action has and always will be to visualize
> ideas and to explore our environments using whatever devices are available.
>
> Today we have increasingly powerful instruments, such as personal computer
> workstations, stereoscopic video displays and interactive software, to
> present artificially fabricated environments, popularly known as Virtual
> Reality. The technological elements are in place and we have begun our
> investigation into the latest and greatest form of artistic communication.
>
> Virtual Reality promises artists the most exciting break-through for the
> creative process since the invention of motion pictures. Now at the dawn of
> an era of virtual arts, the first generations of tools wait patiently to
> tell us something that we don't already know.
>
> But what message do they bring? Is there any passion here? High-end
> technology is not an end in itself. It merely represents the latest in a
> long list of tools that can be used for human expression. We have not come
> this far just to do cool computer tricks or sell vacant office space. There
> has been an unfortunate lack of artistic activity in cyberspace. We must
> focus on this cultural deficit and breathe life into the cold silicon void
> that we have created.
>
> By considering the tools of Virtual Reality in a historical context of art
> and technology as they relate to the fabrication of simulated experience,
> this panel of active artists intends to provoke constructive thought amongst
> the virtual arts community, promote active exploration of experience as
> an art form and unlock doors to possible roads for our artistic travels
> throughout this age of cybernetics.
>
>
> PATRICE CAIRE
>
> The type of work I am pursuing can be explained by example with a description
> of project called Cyberhead that I designed and managed. Caire's Cyberhead, a
> Virtual Reality installation, is a fully immersed interactive fly through a
> head reconstructed from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data. This Virtual
> Reality journey runs on a Silicon Graphics Onyx Reality Engine2 in real time
> with texture maps using a Fakespace BOOM 2C as high-resolution stereoscopic
> viewing and navigating device. To build the world the Sense8 WorldToolKit
> software was used. 3D sound is generated in real-time by two Beachtrons from
> Crystal River.
>
> Cyberhead was developed in the Virtual Reality Laboratory and the Artificial
> Intelligence Center of SRI International in collaboration with the Lucas MRS
> Center at Stanford University. Additional 3-D CAD models and animation were
> created at Colossal Pictures; Spectrum HoloByte; and by Cyberware. My
> principal collaborators included Harlyn Baker, Nat Bletter, Aron Bonar, Tamar
> Cohen, Gina Faber, Mark Ferneau, Paul Hemler, Lee Iverson, Andy Kopra, Lance
> Norskog, Tom Piantanida, Marc Scaparro, Pierre Vasseur.
>
> My primary goals with Cyberhead were to create a rich, detailed virtual
> environment with convincing, high quality, real time, reality-based (MRI)
> visual images that were properly lit, smoothed, shaded, textured, and
> anti-aliased. Directional sound was an equally important part of this world
> and experience. The human interface was designed to be simple, non-intrusive,
> and suitable for use by the general public. In relation to the audience, the
> goal was to create an entertaining experience that would make users think
> about such issues as how we interpret and associate the information we
> receive from our environment.
>
> My motivation in doing this work was to explore new presentation paradigms
> made possible by this technology. This work also had to address the problem
> of how to represent data which is not easy to represent; how to be immersed
> in, interact with, and navigate through, this kind of data; and finally make
> the process esthetically engaging and educational.
>
>
> JANINE CIRINCIONE
>
> >From the Futurists to the Bauhaus, artists of the 20th C. have embraced
> new ideas and new technologies in an attempt to reach beyond mere
> aesthetic aims, and to help create the future. For one reason or another
> these movements have been superseded by other, more promising visions of
> the future. How do we keep interactivity from turning into yesterday's
> news as opposed to the important, rich, aesthetic medium it can be?
>
> One way of doing this is to incorporate a healthy level of self-awareness
> and criticality into the artistic process. What can the medium do? By
> what standards should the new medium be judged? Is the work's essential
> meaning best expressed in this medium? Does the work fully exploit the
> medium's potential? My collaborative work in virtual reality addresses
> these and other questions.
>
> The Imperial Message, designed in collaboration with Michael Ferraro and
> Brian D'Amato was created as part of the 1993-94 Artist-in-Residency
> Award at The Wexner Center for the Arts, at the Ohio State University in
> Columbus, Ohio. The work is a prototype for an interactive
> virtual-reality game--a new medium somewhere between architecture, film
> and game. The piece is loosely based on the Kafka parable of the same
> name which deals with the vast distance between the Emperor and the
> Individual. The Imperial Message attempts to extend this sense of scale
> to present inherent conflicts between the individual and the state and
> between the unspoken, secret "Law" and its corrupted representation.
>
> Kafka's probing vision of bureaucracy, communications, authoritarian,
> legal and social structures in the formative stages of Imperial China
> relate directly to issues that we face today as we examine the "Utopia"
> of cyberspace.
>
>
> PERRY HOBERMAN
>
> We live in an age in which technological paradigms shift about every half
> year. Almost every month seems to offer radically new media. Overnight, new
> standards are created and, suddenly, what was once exotic becomes merely
> commonplace (if it isn't totally forgotten).
>
> This brings up many profound questions for working artists. Is this
> relentless change a permanent state of affairs, or are we witnessing the
> infancy of some new constellation of interactive media, one that will
> eventually (like the cinema) coalesce into something more lasting? Until
> then, how can we (and should we) keep up? Do we spend all our time learning
> to operate new hardware and software? How can we keep any critical distance
> at all when we are so close to our tools? And what happens to our work when
> the currently state-of-the-art hardware and software that it depends on
> have become obsolete? (Perhaps obsolescence itself has become a key
> category, one that needs to have its pejorative connotations reconsidered.)
>
> For most of the recent history of technology, interactions between people
> and machines have been overwhelmingly monogamous - one user, one interface.
> Even the fantasy of total interconnectedness that drives the current
> mushrooming of the global network posits each and every user at home or
> work with their own terminal; and networked virtual reality is usually
> understood as requiring a head-mounted viewer for each participant. What
> implications does this have for the public display of artworks? And what
> happens when this one-to-one correspondence between person and machine is
> disrupted? Are there more robust models for interactive art, arrangements
> that allow for a simultaneous, fully realized experience for an unspecified
> number of people?
>
> The twin dreams of immersion and interactivity have been with us for some
> time, but we have recently seen their possibilities vastly enriched with
> the advent of ever more powerful computer hardware and software. Concepts
> and ideas that could previously be only described can now be fully
> visualized and inhabited. What new kinds of artworks (if any) are made
> possible by these unprecedented capabilities? Will artists be put in the
> position of merely supplying content for this emerging medium? Or will they
> play an active role in actually defining the medium itself?
>
>
> MICHAEL SCROGGINS
>
> VR technology offers many possibilities for transforming the practice of art;
> however, I would like to concentrate here on addressing a potential of great
> personal interest.
>
> The ability to shape temporal experience through the manipulation of a set of
> simultaneous and successive acoustic events is a power which sound producing
> instruments have afforded the aural composer/performer since pre-history.
> The development during the last decade of videographic devices capable of
> instantaneous generation and manipulation of absolute (or abstract) images
> has given the visual artist a similar power. In this decade, the rapid
> advancements being made in real-time computer graphics technology promise
> even more powerful visual instruments.
>
> My work in videographic animation extends a cinematic tradition which began
> in the twenties with visionary artists such as Oskar Fischinger, Viking
> Eggeling, and Walter Ruttmann. Like those pioneers of absolute cinema,
> I have aspired to the creation of a visual experience of purely formal means
> which --like absolute music-- achieves affect through the architectonic
> structuring of basic elements.
>
> Aside from obvious disparities in how the organs of seeing and hearing are
> mapped onto the brain (and thus consciousness), absolute animation has
> differed from musical experience because of the isolating boundary of the
> frame. VR technology offers a means to dissolve that boundary. For the
> first time in history we may become as totally immersed in the field of
> visible radiation constituting synthetic image as in the ocean of air
> pressure constituting musical sound. Immersive VR will prove to be a
> great advance in the age-old search for an engaging art of pure movement.
>
> _____________________________________________________________
> END
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>