Panel Statement
Panel: An Alembic of Transformation: Virtual Reality as Agent of Change
The complexity of creating artwork for virtual reality theaters such as the CAVE Automatic Environment offers artists a multifarious palette that only begins with hardware and software. The aesthetics of an experience requires creating a plastic environment that ignites the imagination in order to inveigle the visitor and simultaneously engages the visitor. Virtual worlds immerse visitors with a range of perceptual stimuli (visual, auditory, kinesthetic…) that can be exploited through the artistic process. By setting up subversive confrontation between the visitors and the worlds in terms of such techniques as perspective, illusion and projections, a perceptual shift can occur that momentarily usurps ordinary reality. “Figuratively Speaking”, a VR environment for the CAVE, is based on original watercolors of abstract figures whose faces, for the most part, are their bodies and concurrently compose the landscape. This deliberately confounds the environment to engage the visitor in a face-to-face dialogue with particularity and personality.
- Margaret Dolinsky is an Associate Professor at the Hope School of Fine Arts and a Research Scientist with the Pervasive Technology Institute and a Fellow with the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities at Indiana University in Bloomington. ??Dolinsky has been working with virtual environments since 1995, creating interactive art experiences that have been exhibited at SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, ICC in Tokyo, and the Walker Art Center. She was commissioned by the Indianapolis Museum of Art to create “Cabinet of Dreams” a VR experience of Chinese antiquities. She has just returned from China where she exhibited her latest piece “Emotable Portraits.” She co-produced and designed interactive video for the American Opera Theater’s production “Annunciation + Visitation: Operatic Projections of her sexual insight.” Her recent work involves digital projections for opera and experimental film. Her research focuses on how digital art provokes shifts in perception and enhances sensory awareness. Exhibitions include SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, ICC, and the Walker Art Center USA. Her work is published in Leonardo, Discover, Computer Graphics World, US News and World Report and ACM’s Computer Graphics. Lectures include Tsinghua University (China), Ciber@rts Bilboa (Spain), Sensorial Net (Brazil), BEAP (Australia), and ISEA2000 (France). She received an MFA from University of Illinois at Chicago. She is an Associate Professor and Research Scientist at the H.R. Hope School of Fine Arts at Indiana University Bloomington and a researcher with the Planetary Collegium at the University of Plymouth, U.K. Dolinsky is co-chair of the IST & SPIE Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality conference with Ian McDowall.
Full text (PDF) p. 685-691 [title slightly different]