“I’m not sure here, where we are, is real at all. This feels like a game to me. And you, you’re beginning to feel like a game character” –David Cronenberg, eXistenz

In 1984, William Gibson’s Neuromancer imagined the “consensual hallucination” of cyberspace. Since then, virtual reality has become an idea both seductive and terrifying, a tragically impossible utopia, a transcendent dream and the tool of the military-industrial complex. Today, immersive technologies and virtual worlds give artists an extraordinary new medium for expression and a new space in which to examine and critique contemporary digital culture. Using interactive 3D graphics, immersive displays, motion tracking, and spatialized audio, virtual reality is a means to investigate questions of space, narrative, perception, illusion, and the interface between the physical body and computer-generated worlds. Working in immersive environments is an interdisciplinary practice, drawing from sculpture, architecture, installation art, experimental music, computer science and more.

Walls are too easily accepted as limits. I install writhing masses of drywall and other construction materials to intervene with the boundaries of permanent sites. In threatening aesthetic distance, the piece blurs the processes which created the object, creation and destruction; in addition to questioning the physical thresholds imposed by walls, namely those in the white cube.

The BFA show is fast approaching, I’ve been working out the plans for it, will post later. The images above are in order:

Two views from my installation at the Moore Complex (the installation proposal from my previous post); Wall Drawing, 2009.

At the core of my work, the Cézannesque approach of undermining objects into basic geometric forms takes precedence. The work of architects Maya Lin and Lebbeus Woods has also greatly informed me as to how space acts as an active medium that conveys hidden forces. Similarly, the systems of information in Judy Mehretu’s drawings have greatly influenced my manner of working with the renderings of holistic environments. The vector field environments by the sculptor Antony Gormley, along with the installations by Illya Kabakov, sparked my initial interest of moving my drawings into three-dimensional space. My work has also gained a lot of valuable input from Ben Fry’s writings about his computer language, Processing, which expanded my understanding of the mechanics behind the digital image.

Prerender, 2009, Mixed Media

Render_worldspace, 2009, Mixed Media

worldspace, 2008, Mixed Media, 72 x 48 in

The source of my work is video games.

Although illusionistic and immersive in their imagery, there is a narrow point of contact between computer-rendered environments and human interface. Unlike an image passively rendered behind a screen, the physicality of my work becomes immdiate, even threatening. Latent processes and mathematical models, usually hidden underneath the final rendering of the digital environment, are given precedence in my work. Vectors, texture maps and mesh polygons become autonomous entities, undermining the facade of representational rendering in videogames. Translating digital environments into drawings and installations, the unseen becomes preceivable and the intangible, concrete.