Margaret Dolinsky

Collaborative virtual environments art exhibition

This panel presentation will exhibit artwork developed in CAVEs and discuss how art methodologies enhance the science of VR through collaboration, interaction and aesthetics. Artists and scientists work alongside one another to expand scientific research and artistic expression and are motivated by exhibiting collaborative virtual environments. Looking towards the arts, such as painting and sculpture, computer graphics captures a visual tradition. Virtual reality expands this tradition to not only what we face, but to what surrounds us and even what responds to our body and its gestures. Art making that once was isolated to the static frame and an optimal point of view is now out and about, in fully immersive mode within CAVEs. Art knowledge is a guide to how the aesthetics of 2D and 3D worlds affect, transform, and influence the social, intellectual and physical condition of the human body through attention to psychology, spiritual thinking, education, and cognition. The psychological interacts with the physical in the virtual in such a way that each facilitates, enhances and extends the other, culminating in a “go together” world. Attention to sharing art experience across high-speed networks introduces a dimension of liveliness and aliveness when we “become virtual” in real time with others.

Reordering virtual reality: recording and recreating real-time experiences

The proliferation of technological devices and artistic strategies has brought about an urgent and justifiable need to capture site-specific time-based virtual reality experiences. Interactive art experiences are specifically dependent on the orchestration of multiple sources including hardware, software, site-specific location, visitor inputs and 3D stereo and sensory interactions. Although a photograph or video may illustrate a particular component of the work, such as an illustration of the artwork or a sample of the sound, these only represent a fraction of the overall experience. This paper seeks to discuss documentation strategies that combine multiple approaches and capture the interactions between art projection, acting, stage design, sight movement, dialogue and audio design.

Visual navigation structures in collaborative virtual environments

The international Grid, or the iGrid, is a fertile ground for exploring levels of sensorial communication, visual metaphors and navigation strategies. This paper seeks to answer the following questions: What is the iGrid? What does it mean to share a collaborative virtual environment (CVE)? What implications does sharing CVEs have for communication? What are visual navigation strategies across a high performance high-speed network? How can art shape experience in a technological world? Networking virtual environments via the iGrid establishes a performance theater where academics and researchers create dialogues between disciplines. CVEs synergize towards a new dimension of literacy where knowledge is presented as abstract visual engagement. In CVEs, the visuals act as three dimensional navigation icons that can symbolize a choice to be made, a direction to consider or a sequence in a narrative. The users ability to influence events and receive feedback from the environment through sensorial stimulation enhances the level of immersion. Art CVEs function across the network based on aesthetic style, engagement, levels of interaction and the quality of audio immersion. A level of plasticity, or malleability, is required in CVEs to encourage participants to become directly involved with understanding and realizing the environment.

The Living Canvas: Interactive Chloroplasts

The Living Canvas is a science/art/educational exhibit of artwork created by using the positioning of chloroplasts in leaf cells as an artistic medium and using light to control that medium. The work reveals the process of chloroplast movements as they occur in leaf cells and how those subcellular changes affect the optical properties of whole leaves to maximize photosynthesis. The works are designed to stimulate a sense of intrigue and awe to enhance the viewers’ awareness of plant life and their relationships with plants in their environment.

The renaissance of VR: are we going to do it right this time?

After being dormant in the public eye for more than 10 years, VR is now back to the front pages re-discovered as the portal to push the limits of our imagination towards compelling immersive experiences that can also blend with the physical world. Well-established companies and strongly backed new companies are committing serious investments into VR and its applications. This second VR wave is coming strong and fast in making VR accessible for the general public, not as the specialized technology for a few elite research labs of the 90s and early 2000s.

Artist Round Tables

Taking the Planetary Collegium as their starting point, members of the round table address research issues as they relate to the development of practice and theory in the context of collaborative criticism and inquiry across a wide field of knowledge and experience. The Collegium network is worldwide, in terms of its meeting and conference locations, the cultural identity of its members, and its ambition to develop nodes based on and complementary to its unique procedures and method-ologies. The Collegium emerges from 10 years of experience with CAiiA-STAR in gathering doctoral and post-doctoral researchers of high calibre whose work transcends orthodox subject boundaries, and whose practices are at the leading edge of their fields. We are living in a time of crisis for universities, museums and corporations, a time in which old cultural and academic structures need to be replaced by research organisms fitted to our telematic, post-biological society. The Collegium combines the physical, face-to-face transdisciplinary association of individuals with the nomadic, trans-cultural requirements of a networking community. The panelists, all members of the Collegium at various stages in its development, present their personal visions of the direction future research might take and the structures needed to support it.

Shifting Perceptions – Shifting Realities

A confrontation with augmented reality (AR) fuses a virtual entity in a geographical location and promotes psychological immersion and perceptual shifts. As the body’s physical relationship repositions itself to a restructured world, AR influences emotional thinking. This chapter is an artistic journey to define perceptual shifts, explore the multiplicity of realities and reveal the many layers of a sense of presence through Immersion. AR art incorporated in small southern Indiana town makes the locals wary of strangers waving computer devices to capture photographs of their sanctuary. The musings and conversations that transpire offer a window into a world beyond AR which opens up an awareness to the historicity of the moment. The AR appears as a balloon shaped heart blazing with a picture of Lenin raising his arm to the sky. The AR is motivated by Skwarek’s participation in the Occupy movement and the celebration of May Day and the motivations of these movements are also discussed. AR facilitates an investigation of space and an earnestness of place in the community.

Imaging technological structures for organisation of biological consciousness and aesthetic experience

Art situates consciousness. More importantly virtual art actively situates human consciousness while simultaneously illustrating the self as agent provocateur of consciousness. The syncretism between biological self and technological world is deeply rooted in the consciousness of arts as they provide the dynamic for wetware upgrades supplied in the form of digital projections, virtual environments and high-end virtual reality display systems. Virtual art extends the private research laboratory of social awareness and intimate interaction by resituating the personal in experiential time-based modes of aesthetic experience. This paper examines a phenomenon whereby the actions in virtual systems that are driven by both sequential image construction and human-computer intervention simultaneously activates the organisation of the stream of consciousness experience.

Front Matter: Volume 6804

This PDF file contains the front matter associated with SPIE-IS&T Proceedings Volume 6804, including the Title Page, Copyright information, Table of Contents, Introduction (if any), and the Conference Committee listing.© (2008) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.