Re: [-empyre-] Collective Media, Personal Media

[noah wardrip-fruin <noah@queeg.com>]

At 1:55 PM -0800 11/1/04, Christina McPhee wrote:
> Noah, and others, how would you view the the creative domain of the CAVE as
> an arena for critical technical practices, or do you think that its history
> promised more than it has been able to deliver? Does the NMR itself have a
> role to play in clarifying the philosophical context of the CAVE, by
> implication?

Perhaps I'll do what I did in answering Jim's email, and start by 
answering just part of what you've written (hoping to get to more 
later).

I've actually been working in the Cave myself at Brown for the last 
couple years. I think the history of new media (particularly work 
like Krueger's) and work from CTP folks (particularly Simon Penny's 
Cave work) was important to me in thinking about my work there.

Most Cave work (most VR work) is about creating a stable geographic 
space and moving over and through it. Krueger's Videoplace was in 
some ways like the Cave, but it's uses weren't all about flying the 
participant over an artificial space, and I felt that the Cave's uses 
didn't have to be either. In fact, I felt that, for the sort of work 
that interests me, that sort of use probably wouldn't be appropriate.

The Cave project I've been pursuing at Brown is called Screen. (I'm 
working with Josh Carroll, Robert Coover, Andrew McClain, and Shawn 
Greenlee.) Rather than try to make the Cave disappear, Screen 
reinforces the fact that you're standing in a box. The piece begins 
with text on the walls, just as it would be in a traditional video 
projection environment. The texts are fictional sketches, working 
with memory as a virtual experience. Then a word from one of these 
memories peels from the wall and begins to move around the reader. 
Then another, and another. The reader can hit a word with her hand, 
at which point it returns to the wall (if there is an available space 
that's large enough) or breaks apart. Words may return to their own 
spaces or others, whatever's available. The words peel faster over 
time, and when too many are off the walls at once the rest come 
loose, swirl around the reader, and then collapse.

So we used the Cave not for the exploration of virtual space, but for 
exploring some new types of relationship with language. (Work like 
Camille Utterback's has certainly explored bodily interaction with 
text, but not in the same direct way that the Cave allows ). And the 
peeling, the hitting, and the scrambled texts that begin to assemble 
on the walls create types of reading experience that I haven't seen 
before. I think a lot of my work as an artist deals with language and 
memory and memory's instability, and I've found Screen a very 
satisfying project so far. But if I'd been confronted with the Cave 
before being exposed to work like Krueger's I think I might just have 
walked away thinking, "What does an environment like this have to 
offer for work like mine?"

Now, there are definitely larger issues about art and science, and 
about using perspectives from the arts and humanities to expose (and 
work through) invisible unhelpful assumptions embedded in existing 
technical practices. But in my case (with Krueger and the Cave) it 
was arguably the guy who started us down the path to the technology 
that also provided the art-oriented undermining of the technology's 
later dominant use and helped me see the way to the work I wanted to 
pursue.

Noah


PS - In case people are curious, here are a couple (dated) images of Screen:
http://hyperfiction.org/graphics/screen1.jpg
http://hyperfiction.org/graphics/screen2.jpg