Artist Statement

Video-kinetic sculptural installation

The use of virtual reality models is particular to this system of depth discrimination. A perceptual response to changes in pictorial space can be conditioned by how the viewer may be orientated to an implied or simulated depth. Virtual pictorial space is therefore fundamentally a system of orientation, where the viewer may become relocated or dislocated from an immediate or physical frame of reference.

The subjective experience of perceptual depth discrimination is for me more consistent to a curvilinear visual space that is particular to the peculiar frame of reference of the viewer. Virtual reality systems however are based on an empirical system of linearity. The distinction between the world of immediate and subjective experience and the empiricism of science becomes blurred when ambiguities in visual perception are labelled as incorrect by the interpretation of linear measurement. This results in an assault on the perceptual autonomy of the spectator by conditioning a dependence to this model of field orientation.

As stated by the mathematician Luneburg in 1956: “Visual straightness differs from the straightness we attribute to a total act of perception to objects manufactured with increasing perfection in our physical surroundings.”

• Dennis Wilcox, Australia

This project was assisted by the Art & Development Fund of the Australian Network for Art and Technology.