Through the Looking Glass
Supervert's review of an exhibit featuring early works by artists exploring virtual reality. Originally published in Artforum Magazine (October 1992).
Exhibit at the Jack Tilton Gallery, New York
Could kids on drugs in virtual reality become homicidal criminals? As "interactivist" artist Brenda Laurel reports in her essay in the thought-provoking catalogue that accompanies this show, she doesn't quite know how to respond when confronted with this question during a call-in radio interview. "My husband was in the studio with me and we just looked at each other for a minute, trying to grok." Grok? Homicidal lunatics? Is there a communication problem here? A break in the circuitry? To technological illiterati, VR enthusiasts must seem as hermetic as a group of Masons, with their esoteric lingo and their rendezvous in cyberspace — hence the misperceptions, the suspicions, and the necessity for an exhibition such as "Through the Looking Glass." The parameters of this show were broadly defined to include interactivity, computer-generated models, virtual imaging, 3-D spatial environments, artificial realities, and cyberpunk aesthetics in general. Accordingly, there is a diverse selection of works, ranging from Jaron Lanier's early computer game Moondust, 1983, to a stereoscopic diorama by David Wilson. Conceived by curator Janine Cirincione as a forum for projects and experiments, the show demonstrates what artists are doing to bridge that gap between hardware, software, and wetware (i.e. people). "The human interface," as artist Myron Krueger declares in his contribution to the catalogue, is as much an aesthetic issue as an engineering one." Krueger, who has worked in computer art for over twenty years, has long argued that the most important facet of the medium is not its illusionistic but its interactive potential. His work VIDEOPLACE is thus about as easy to use as a mirror. In VIDEOPLACE, a video camera sends your image to a system of computers, where it is processed and then sent back to a projection screen. There, your colored silhouette is able to interact with computer-generated sound and imagery: amongst other things, you can make music by waving your hands or play with a graphic creature called CRITTER. But is this really virtual reality? Isn't it just computer art?
Virtual reality has been greatly preceded by its reputation. The recent film Lawnmower Man popularized the notion of VR as a sort of sensurround envelope into which you could project yourself by means of "goggles and gloves." However, the irony, as Simon Penny points out in a useful catalogue essay, is that VR is doubly virtual at the moment insofar as the "hard" technology exists only in its most rudimentary form. And although Cirincione did manage to borrow a state-of-the-art VR set-up for a few days (thanks to the Intel Corporation, the Sense8 Corporation, and VirtualResearch), the promise of brave new worlds seems sold short by the videotapes of softworlds (VR environments) that viewers are able to watch, minus a dimension or two, on TV screens. Matt Mullican's virtual city, Nicole Stenger's Angels (in which participants would meet angels in a simulated firmament), and Brian D'Amato's Sacrifice Game (a VR game in which the object is "to immolate yourself as often, and as spectacularly, as possible") don't seem like much compared to, say, the computer-generated morphing that made it possible for Michael Jackson to turn into a panther in his video for "Black and White." Then again, this comparison is unfair, since artists do not typically have access to the high-level technology that corporations can use for such big-budget spectacles. As William Gibson, author of the cyberpunk bible Neuromancer, 1984, and also a contributor to this show, has remarked, "The future has arrived, it just isn't evenly distributed."
In one of the most interesting projects in the exhibition, artist David Johnson was busy at a workstation creating a virtual rendition of the the Tilton gallery itself. Johnson, a simulist and computer animator who has worked with deconstructivist architect Peter Eisenman, explains that the idea will be to enter the "real" gallery, put on a VR headset, and find yourself in the virtual gallery. Inside, because it is algorithmic, space can become infinitely recursive (something like Chinese boxes, where every box contains another, smaller box); in other words, you can walk through a wall in the virtual gallery without ever being able to exit the space itself. A gallery without end — is this fun? Is this a nightmare? Could kids on drugs in a virtual Tilton gallery become homicidal criminals?
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