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Is Virtual Art Quasi-Art?
I have been exploring for many years the potential
of virtual technologies as tools for metaphorical architecture of communication.
After having tried, in the early nineties, with the Quarxs, a 3D computer
animation series, to say how the truth can escape even science, I thought
that Virtual Reality was the perfect tool for interrogating Art and the
audience.
The "Big Questions", starting with "Is God Flat?"
was for me the opportunity to make a statement about the relationship between
space, spectator individuality and meaning. If architecture is a space
to live, Virtual reality can be a space to read. In "Is God Flat?" the
audience explores an infinite world of bricks. Each participant can
build his own labyrinth in search of the flat, one dimensional images of
God(s) from art history.
Is the Devil Curved? was the second of
these Big Questions in which, by digging corridors in the sky we
meet a living creature who attempts to seduce us, casting sounds of
physical pleasure and changing his (her?) shape and behavior in order to
gain a wider audience. So called Intelligent Agents and artificial life
were used to provide a "virtual" experience of full potential and not pre-written
story.
In 1995 the Tunnel Under The Atlantic allows
people from the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) and Museum of Contemporary
Art (Montreal) to meet each other by digging tunnels into pictures of the
common past.
Golden Nica Interactive Art Ars Electronica 98,
World Skin, "a photo-safari in the land of war", is a CAVE work
where the audience removes parts of memory taking photos in the virtual
world. They leave the virtual land of war with the printed shots, material
witnesses of the lost memory.
Maurice Benayoun
Université de Paris 1
Z-A Production (Paris)
maurice@benayoun.com
http://www.benayoun.com
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