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May 10, 2006

Device Art Brings Technology to Life

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You Don't Try to Hide it

"...The works of art along the Japanese aisle at the International Conference on Virtual Reality in Laval, western France this weekend are not the sort you find protected behind glass. On the contrary, it is up to the spectator to bring them to life. "Please touch", the signs read. "Virtual reality opens up a whole new space, where the work of art becomes dynamic", where "the artist is no longer unique", explains Alain Grumbach, a virtual reality specialist who teaches computer science at the national school of telecommunications in Paris. Spectators "derive emotion from the images, but also from the possibility they have of changing the course of those images," Grumbach notes.

The effect is almost magical. It is an odd sensation, dipping a wooden spoon into an empty bowl and watching it splash around in clear water on the adjacent screen ("Wet-Free Water" by the Nara institute of science and technology, Japan).

It is a funny feeling, pushing a box of tea across a table and feeling a team of tiny virtual imps resisting it with all their might, but visible only through a little wooden window -- as in "Kobito Virtual Brownies" by the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

A little further on, Norimichi Idehara, associate professor of information sciences at Tokyo's Tama university, is fretting over his virtual planet, an ecosystem under a globe, whose "creatures are near to extinction", despite the public's efforts to generate rain by touching the globe.

"It's magical but people know it's a technology", says Machiko Kusahara of the School of Letters, Arts and Sciences at Waseda University in Tokyo. "You don't try to hide it".

"Device art", the latest craze in Japan at the moment, "is often gadget-like", Kusahara continues, "but with carefully designed artistic intention. Artists produce commercial products for available in daily life... [they] try to reach the widest possible audience."

Japanese culture does not draw a firm distinction between noble, "fine art" and "low art", Kusahara explains. Device art reflects the importance of aesthetics in daily life, or "beauty in the tools".

The virtual bowl of water is appealing simply as an image, and the clear sound of flowing and splashing is pretty. Yet neither the camera that films your real-world movement, nor the computer that works out how the virtual water should move, are hidden. The object is a piece of technological virtuosity.

The little tea-box imps are actually already available in the shops. "Imagine life with Kobito", their Internet advertisement says (rogiken.org/vr). "It will give you comfort when you are in trouble".

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At the end of the Japanese aisle Hideaki Ogawa's installation, "Perfect Time", is of a more philosophical bent. A thin screen veil of golden grains flows out of its "hourglass", onto which images are projected. It is up to the audience to put sand in the "hourglass". If they do not, then they cannot see the images. Our perception of time is thus suspended. The virtual exists only when there is interaction between person and object." From Yahoo News.

Posted by jo at May 10, 2006 10:29 AM

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