EtherWorlds presents Australian and international art projects developed by means of web 3D technology over the period 1999-2005. The exhibition in reality consists of three separate 3-dimensional on-line environments - that of the juried international exhibition Web3DArt2005 (as well as its past incarnations), and two separate installations by the Australian artists Melinda Rackham (Empyrean) and Adam Nash (Scorched Happiness). The exhibition is aimed at continuing the dialogue in the growing field of web 3D art and urges the creation of new web 3D projects.[1]
Few of us have doubts as to what art is, but what in fact is web 3D art, and what are the artists who are using it aiming to achieve? The web 3D technology has in the past been known as VRML (virtual reality modeling language). VRML/web 3D refers to a programming or descriptive language used to deliver interactive 3D objects and 'worlds' across the internet. It also leads the way in searching for various methods to communicate 3D environments over the net, and can be viewed as one of the proofs that art can no longer be segregated from science and technology.
Artists who work in web 3D have to deal with a variety of emerging factors including interactive 3D object creation, the construction of a 'world', spatial and environment simulation, 3D narrative, poetic hyper-structures and some even deal with interactive art games. Artists dealing with this art form also have to think of different sorts of software to develop their projects (or their 'worlds', as some would prefer to say), as well as think of wider issues of data systems, data organisation, the structure of links, hypertext, etc. Most of the artists have been utilising a range of plug-ins such as Cortona, Blaxxun, BS Contact, EON, Axel, Shockwave, Flash, Viewpoint, Atmosphere, Flux, Virtools, Cult3D, Sculpt3D.
Melinda Rackham's Empyrean emphasises the sensual nature of medium and offers a way forward towards the new web 3D landscape. It also opens up questions as to whether a reliable critical discourse can be created at all when the concept moves from the virtual to the real and vice-versa. Melinda's work additionally forces us to examine the biological aspects of what it is that happens to brainwaves during the eyes' reception of motions, colours and sounds.
Adam Nash's work tends to explore the virtual space for all the ways that it is not like physical space. He says;
"Rather than performing within the space, I simply perform the space itself, treating it in the way that a painter might a canvas or as a musician may a room. Because it is an imaginary space, nested infinities are quite feasible. In virtual space, concepts of up, down, in, out, weight, gravity and time do not exist natively. Naturally, humans reference these concepts unconsciously when presented with a 'space' of any kind, so my work plays with these concepts, inverting, subverting, expanding and nesting them. As a result, the viewer is generally immersed within the work, is encouraged to navigate within it, and will find the most enjoyment from giving in to the strangeness of the space created. To help people enjoy the works, they all default to an automatically moving camera view enabling the user to be passively moved through the space/work. In these works, vision and sound occupy equal weight and are generally both subjected to the same spatial, temporal and tonal algorithms."
Perhaps to additionally describe the state of affairs in which the web 3D artists, and the entire web 3D community find themselves, I will use Mark Pesce's [2] observation that;
"...a life cycle of a community has three distinct phases - connection, collection, and correction. Connection as community comes together for a first time; Collection as community gathers data for a common purpose, establishes direction and takes action; and Correction to remediate and absorb lessons learned."
Tony Parisi saw us in the Correction phase of this cycle, as having gained a lot of experience, and having been through some growing pains, and where the time has come to learn from our experiences.
Melentie Pandilovski
Director, Experimental Art Foundation
1 The exhibition is a follow up of a series of presentations and a workshop, organised by the Experimental Art Foundation during 2003, and 2004. This field of artistic practice will be re-visted in February 2006, as the EAF will organise a Web3D Art Workshop led by Karel Dudesek, and Martin Schmitz (Van Gogh TV).
2 Two people whom are to be credited for the invention of VRML are Tony Parisi and Mark Pesce.
ADAM NASH www.yamanakanash.net/scorched_happiness/index.html
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Scorched Happiness by Adam Nash yamanakanash.net/scorched_happiness is an online interactive realtime 3D audiovisual work. It is available in both multi-user and single-user versions. Inspired by Julia Kristeva's text "Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner", from her famous work Strangers to Ourselves, Scorched Happiness uses abstract audiovisual avatars to simultaneously explore the notions of identity and foreigness in cyberspace and real space. In Scorched Happiness, the avatars literally become the space. There is no 3D world without the avatars that inhabit it. Visitors may navigate this world as they please, either independently or by following a preprogrammed path. Either way, the user meets a stunning audiovisual experience.
The multi-user version features live avatar performances. These performer avatars challenge conventional notions within multi-user realtime 3D worlds, which usually maintain a default assumption that the avatar is a representation of the user and therefore should be a visual analogue of the user's physicality, whether fantastic or otherwise. This arises from a basic assumption that 3D space is a representation of real physical space. This is an assumption that Scorched Happiness rejects totally. The performance avatars fill the entire space with sound and intricate time-based patterns. Visitors to the space, whose avatars are 'invisible', must adjust to this new space in whatever way they can. This is similar to the adjustment the 'foreigner' is required to make upon arrival. Kristeva's 'Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner' describes the process of this adjustment, and so serves as inspiration for both the design of the performance avatars and for the emotional undercurrent of the work itself. All visuals, all sounds are created and changed by the visitor's journey through the space. Each visitor will experience a different version based not only on their own audiovisual perception, but also upon their navigation of the space itself.
The single-user version features archived realtime 3D 'recordings' of previous performances. Whilst the emotional thrill of interacting with others in a multi-user space is absent, visitors to the space still create their own version of the Scorched Happiness world through their navigation of the space. Alternatively, they may wish to hook into a preprogrammed navigation path and allow the audiovisual world to wash over them.
MELINDA RACKHAM's Empyrean http://www.subtle.net/empyrean is a soft-skinned scape, an organic online multi-user environment. It is a meditation on the form and beauty of computer-constructed virtual space with imagery drawn from both cosmology and microbiology. Inside this space, which is both micro- and macroscopic, there is no familiar horizon line to orient oneself against. Instead the viewer explores this visceral immersive environment via its in-tensions and strange attractions, metaphorically touching the energetic voids of virtuality.
Historically, in the medieval cosmos, Empyrean was the final and encompassing sphere of the heavens in an earth-centred universe - the place where god and the angels lived, outside of which nothing was seen to exist. It was the final frontier of being - the edge of reality. Here, our Virtual Reality Empyrean consists of seven aesthetically different interconnected non-hierarchical scapes - strange, charm, beauty, truth, chaos, void, and order. Its influences come from a wide range of areas - popular physics, eastern spirituality, posthuman theory, the colonisation of the web, and isolation in virtual space. Overall it engages with the tactility and sensory embodiment of operating inside an electronic dimensional inter-network.
Empyrean's subtle soundscape, designed by Mitchell Whitelaw, is spatialised and attached to often moving etheric objects, so once inside the world the sound is constantly shifting around the viewer's avatar. Each zone has a distinctive sonic atmosphere, from the glassy crunching and grinding spheres of chaos, or the frenetic cellular skating rink in charm, to the tinkling birdsong of the delicately choreographed neurons in void.
In Empyrean we are transparently and softly embodied, interacting via avatars that have no human characteristics whatsoever, rather being surprisingly cute cellular/electronic constructions. This addresses the almost universal trend to homogenise online avatar representation to tall western silicone-enhanced English-speaking stereotypes. Avatar interaction is through pre-verbal sound and gestures - they may squeak, squawk, blink, swell up and go opaque, gurgle, giggle, blush. It delights in engaging with avatars as a new online species in a fun way.
Empyrean aims to unify our external and internal experience of the three-dimensional spatiality of the internet by constructing a place that is sensory in an electronic way. Our reality then, Virtual or otherwise, is merely a resting place along the continuum of being.
Empyrean was produced and authored by Melinda Rackham, sound design by Mitchel Whitelaw, additional scripting and modeling by Horst Kiechle and Peter Christensen, vnet modification by Danny Stanic and Lian Loke. Additional production support by the College of Fine Art, UNSW; Australia Council for the Arts; Banff Center for the Arts, Canada; Vislab, Sydney.
WEB3DART web3dart.org is an international on-line competition ongoing since 1999. It is the only international show of its kind and, at its home domain, has become the biggest collection of three-dimensional art and design sites ever assembled.[1]
The WEB3DART exhibition demonstrates the digital language of international artists who express themselves with dynamic interactive simulations in three-dimensional virtual space. It also shows advances in the content and structure possible in the web 3D medium, amplifying a new wave of creative output by artists and designers who are integrating the internet, 3D visualisation, virtual reality, video/audio, and issues of navigation.
The first VRML exhibition in Paderborn, Germany, in 1999, served as a basis which led to the subsequent projects such as the exhibition and workshop for SEAFair 1999 in Skopje; Transmediale in Berlin; 2000 WEB3DART exhibition in Monterey, California; 2000 VRML-ART Expo at the SIGGRAPH Art Show in New Orleans; The Computer Art Festival in Maribor, Slovenia; WEB3DART 2002 at The Media Centre of ICA London, the 2003 WEB3DART show in Saint Malo, France, the WEB3DART 2004 at the 9th International Conference on 3D Web Technology in Monterey, USA. A special selection was presented at the Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH 2004 in Los Angeles.
The selection for WEB3DART2005, which is the sixth international exhibition of WEB3DART, features a selection of artistic, commercial and student projects from fourteen countries. WEB3DART2005 was premiered at the Web 3D Symposium, the 10th International Conference on 3D Web Technology in Bangor, Wales, UK in March/April 2005.
As with previous years, the exhibition was by way of a competitive submission process. Each of the works was considered by the jury for its operational functionality, the content within the 3D visualisation, and its innovation towards the use of 3D in creative works of artists and designers.[2]
1 Karel Dudesek, Martin Schmitz and Kathy Rae Huffman, have been the key organisers of the Web 3D Art exhibitions. Members of the jury have also included Zvonimir Bakotin, Melentie Pandilovski, Tom Holley, Arghyro Paouri, Masaki Fujihata, etc.
2 The 2005 jury consisted of Prof. Karel Dudesek Head of the postgraduate course at the College of Design and Communication, Kent, UK, Melentie Pandilovski, Director of the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide - Australia, Taylor Nuttall, Director of the Folly Gallery, Lancaster, UK, and Martin Schmitz, Van Gogh TV, Germany.
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