Art & Technology #19: Spatialization of Technical Images

The beginning of the full-scale research on technologies for experiencing VR and fundamental technologies of the related devices was the development of a “Head mounted display (HMD)” in 1968 by Ivan Edward Sutherland, a computer scientist at the University of Utah. He attached a monitor to a helmet to display images in front of a person, attempting a new way of acquiring information and experiencing images. Image media in the past such as TV have provided image experience not quite different than that through a picture in terms of a physical structure. The displayed contents were similar to the reality; they were firmly separated from the factual world by square frames, and the viewers could only appreciate the image inside the frame. In such situation, an HMD was proposed not as image experience through the window, but as an attempt for an experience on another level.

One of such examples in art is artist Jung Yeon-doo. He held a private exhibition, Just Like the Road Across the Earth, at Japan’s Art Tower Mito in November 2014, where he presented Blind Perspective, an artwork created with MAGR (Music and Audio Research Group) of Seoul National University. In this piece, the 40-meter long hallway of the exhibition place was combined with a virtual space. A bunch of garbage was sitting in the actual exhibition place; when a viewer put on a VR headset and entered the place, a beautiful and peaceful scene of the nature was seen. Since the coordinates of the garbage in the actual place and the coordinates of the trees and rocks of the nature display coincided with each other, the viewer could experience the virtual nature without bumping into the actual garbage or being disturbed by any other exterior elements. By overlapping the ruins of Fukushima right after it had been severely damaged by the Tohoky earthquake with the beautiful nature before the accident occurred in a single place, the work projected the two different times of the past as the virtual and the factual scenes in the present.

Vilem Flusser suggested the “telematic society” as an actual environment, where one can import or manipulate a real situation at somewhere far away through the network, that is, where one can gather pieces of information at other places to represent them here, in front of one’s eyes, with which one can have a physically similar or exaggerated experience and send a feedback. This means the expansion of a space, and can be concluded positively, as the birth of “Homo ludens.” On the other hand, technologies can also enable us to clearly distinguish the two worlds. Friedrich Kittler says that technologies reveals the real world we are living in more distinctly, that is, in the situation where one’s perception is based on technical media, elements that had not been recognized yet can be found, enabling distinguishment between the newly learned perception and the existing one. These various thoughts and predictions may not be focused only in a partial way, but be mixed with each other in the rapid change of the environment.
Showing active moves again, VR is breaking the existing frame as a surface of technical images and an entrance to the telematics society, approaching us as an expanded environment. In this situation, what is important is finding the difference of the factual and the virtual in the middle of such flow of development. Though the virtual and material worlds coexist, differences between them still exist and are necessary for us. Art can enforce and enlarge a specific point of view to present the other side that we could have ignored. The various artworks mentioned above focus on suggesting special perceptual experiences provided by VR and the meaning thereof. Through games and TV programs to non-daily parts of life such as art, we should have an attitude as a stroller who walks around the differences between the factual and the virtual in this era. ■ with ARTINPOST