Carles Gutierrez produced a work at the Interactivos? Lima'09: Magic and Technology event in 2009 called Abracadabra Pata (pictured above), where the spanish word "pata" refers to a leg or foot. It consisted of a large box with a slot where people could insert a limb and then view their arm transformed into the paw or hoof of an animal through a small peephole. The installation created a kind of altered-reality magic box, not unlike the kinds of containers historically used by illusionists to saw people in half or make scantily clad assistants magically vanish. After having thrust your arm into the magic box, you could then peer through a lens-like interface into a hybrid scene of fantasy and reality. Projected onto an angled piece of glass suspended over a background of small plants and grass, you witnessed your arm and hand transformed into the limb of some grotesque, mythical beast. A camera tracked the motions of your real arm, synchronising the animations of the virtual limb with your movements, resulting in the uncanny sensation of actually having a hideous paw instead of an hand. While the fantasy of having a transformed arm was clearly made explicit, knowledge of this still failed to quell the feeling of unease and sense of dislocation triggered by the sight of the monstrous extension. The psychology at work possibly related somehow to the phenomenon of phantom limbs and the way in which our brain visually processes the sight of our own bodies. In any case, this simple virtual modification was enough to create a disturbing but undeniably immersive experience.
My own piece titled Frame Seductions (pictured above), from the same exhibition in Lima also duped a person's visual perception in order to draw them into a fantasy world, to serve as the "hook" into an immersive experience. Frame Seductions is a project experimenting with the cinematic concept of Hors Champ (Out of Screen), using the gaze of an audience member to direct the perspective of a video. The visual output is a panoramic video that is continually changing and never ending, consisting of looped portions of video that can be panned horizontally and vertically in response to the direction of a viewer's gaze. Only a small section of the video panorama is ever shown at any one time. This viewport, about a third smaller than the video panorama, is controlled by a six-degrees-of-freedom face tracker and displayed on a large framed screen. The sensation is designed to give a person standing in front of the video frame the feeling that they are peering into another world, with the perspective of the video following their gaze. They are able to look outside of the original frame, and peer into the wings of the world depicted on the screen, thus liberating themselves of the artificial construction of the frame. The natural act of looking is therefore employed as a catalyst for immersion, without the need for any cumbersome head-mounted gear required by the virtual reality rigs of old.
I attended the Tweak exhibition in Limerick, Ireland last year and came across a couple playful pieces that either purposefully or inadvertently created immersive experiences that demonstrated the principle of Ready-to-hand. Michael Markert's kII (Kempelen 2.0 - pictured above) project is "a voice-topological interface for gestural navigation in linguistic space. The hand serves as the speech organ during the articulation process"8. Using puppet-like hand movements to imitate the opening and closing of a mouth, this sound installation uses sensors to detect the shape of your hand and then translates this approximate mouth-shape into a vocal utterance generated through phonemes from a synthesis chip. The mere act of making a mouth shape using your hands and hearing corresponding sounds draws you into a childish world of make believe and pantomime. It is the intuitive nature of these hand motions that make this piece accessible and the physicality of the act gives way to immersion. Mooshir Vahanvati's piece Maximus was similarly playful as it brought to life a lamp (referencing the infamous Pixar small hopping desk lamp) using electro-mechanical servos combined with some proximity sensors. As you reached out to the lamp with your hand it shied and squirmed in a remarkably organic fashion, mimicking the behaviours of a small domestic pet. While the object itself was clearly not alive, the physical act of reaching out and the life-like reflexes of the lamp drew you in to an alternate world where inanimate objects could have lives of their own. Last year Lukasz Karluk and Sydney sculptor/painter Maddi Boyd created a piece called Timebomb. Nine artists were invited to consecutively paint a wall, with the work of each artist documented by time-lapse photography. The final installation involved both the painted wall and an interactive projection, which used the movement of viewers to reveal the underlying layers of the original painting. The photographed layers were unveiled using a fluid simulation algorithm which peeled back the hidden layers in an organic, non-linear way. This work sets itself apart from other full-body interaction pieces by providing a teasing logic to the interaction. Instead of being a purely reactive process, the work never affords viewers the benefit of absolute closure, as revealing one part of a layer will hide another thanks to the incompressibility of the fluid animation. It is this combination of physical engagement yet lack of closure that generates the immersive experience. The interfaces to many of the aforementioned works appear simple but are often assisted by quite advanced technologies. I would therefore like to conclude with a final interactive piece that in my mind achieves a sense of immersion through a very basic technology that is innate to all of us. In The Handphone Table device created in 1978 by Laurie Anderson it's possible to experience the phenomenon of bone sound conduction. Recently shown at the excellent See This Sound exhibition in 2009 at the Lentos art musuem in Linz, Austria, the piece requires visitors to sit at a wooden table and place their elbows in two symmetric depressions on the table-top. Stereo music is played through metal rods that are connected to the depressions and by placing your elbows in these concave holes the bones of your elbows come into contact with the rods. The sound vibrations of the music are then conducted from the rods through your arms to the bones in your ear, allowing you to hear the sound while your elbows are connected. What is remarkable about the installation is that the simple act of placing your elbows on a table transports you into an auditory space that is concrete and physical yet also subliminal and highly immersive. Having the sounds conducted through your bones adds an almost virtual component to the piece thanks to the subjective, internal nature of the experience. As an aside, I also find the act of placing elbows on a table to have additional interesting social connotations, however my principal point is that the piece demands very little from the audience other than a simple, intuitive gesture and relies on very simple technology to convey its message. Hindsight/Foresight Immersive technologies are currently proliferating at an exponential rate mostly due to the entertainment, military, simulation and space industries. Artists and designers are faced with new possibilities as programming toolkits for interactive works become more accessible and more powerful. In the face of this abundance of high technology I believe it is important to maintain an understanding of the liminal nature of immersion, especially in the arts and in design, partly because artists will never be able to compete with the budgets of large scale immersive simulations and more importantly because a sense of immersion does not necessarily depend on photo-realistic or complex multi-sensory environments. Immersion can be created from just a handful of perceptual cues. However the desire to recreate ultra-real alternate worlds may inevitably prove too strong for some. The recent release of James Cameron's film Avatar came as a huge disappointment to those hoping for more than just blockbuster popcorn fare. It offered lush, ultra realistic computer generated environments that propped up a hackneyed, generic plot with little room for extrapolation – closure had already been made in the editing suite. Any decent narrative will suggest the details of a story, not enforce them, because our respective imaginations still generate the most convincing virtual realities we have access to today. |
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