From all that’s written on the military and virtual reality, you might think that the equipment and apparatus we have come to associate with VR are exclusively military inventions, when, in fact, artists have played a much more profound role than traditionally credited. As Margot Lovejoy put it in her 2004 Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age:
The sense that virtual reality was of fundamental importance came from artists who communicated it immediately to the public through their work. In addition, many aspects of virtual reality including full body participation, the idea of a shared telecommunications space, multi-sensory feedback, third-person participation, unencumbered approaches and the data glove all came from the art, not from the technical community.
Which is to say, the exploration of perception, immersion, and the self through VR technology really is, at heart, an open exploration, rather than, say, a practical, directed, task-oriented affair. This changes the popular narrative tremendously. Whereas one might previously have thought that data gloves (for instance) are simply a technological ‘solution’ to a problem, their development is in fact intimately tied, historically speaking, to theoretical, artistic projects.
Most artists attracted to work with virtual reality as a medium want to create imaginative interactive environments where they can control all the objects or all the spatial coordinates and sound in order to achieve an aesthetic effect. Powerful computers are used to generate visual experience and to track body movements through the use of prosthetic devices such as data gloves, head-mounted displays and body-suits which encase the body in fiber-optic cabling. Fully immersed in a completely controlled artificial environment, the visual, aural, and tactile capabilities of the body become totally absorbed in following three-dimensional representations which are continuously modeled and tracked through computer monitoring of the body’s every movement. Participants experience environments which seem to be located in three-dimensional real space. The effect is that of a technological invasion of the body’s senses and a relocation of what can be seen and experienced to the realm of a synthetic private world severed from other potential observers.
In any event, thanks to a post by Paul Prudence of Data Is Nature, we’ll be able to follow similar developments through the upcoming Technocultures: The History of Digital Art panel, on which Lovejoy will speak.
Friday, March 6, 6 — 8:30pm
School of Visual Arts
133/141 West 21 Street, Room 101C
Free and open to the publicThe MFA Computer Art Department at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents Technocultures: The History of Digital Art–A Conversation, featuring influential historical practitioners and researchers on digital art. Department Chair Bruce Wands will moderate. The panel will trace the history of digital art through vignettes and personal anecdotes of four pioneers: Kenneth Knowlton, Margot Lovejoy, Kenneth Snelson and Lillian Schwartz. They will be joined by Jeremy Gardiner and Nick Lambert, who are working with Birkbeck College, University of London, and the Victoria and Albert Museum on a project called Technocultures.
Technocultures traces the history of digital art though recent acquisitions by the Victoria and Albert Museum consisting of a collection of approximately 500 digital prints from Patric Prince, a noted digital art collector in the United States and the British Computer Art Society. “This is a historic moment in digital art,” states Bruce Wands, adding, “The Victoria and Albert Museum is taking the international lead in creating permanent archives of early digital work.” The discussion will move from how each of the panelists got involved in digital art and what attracted them to it, to what they are doing today and how digital art is viewed in relation to contemporary and future art practice.
