DROMOS – virtual immersion

In DROMOS, the audience are asked to lay together on the floor of a white cubic space. In such a position, they are rendered passive; the ensuing darkness removes them from the world. Artist Robert Smithson, in his article A Cinematic Atopia (1971), writes: ‘Not much gets in the way of one’s perception. All one can do is look and listen. One forgets where one is sitting. The luminous screen spreads a murky light throughout the darkness […] The outside world fades as the eyes probe the screen’ (138).

I would be inclined to apply Smithson’s analysis of the audience’s to DROMOS, but as the projector turns the room into a fluid and virtual world, the proposition that the audience can only ‘look and listen’ becomes all the more questionable.

The projection beams on, throwing out undulating waves of geometric shapes and information, that appear to recede away from them and then close in on them. It surrounds them. Creators MAOTIK describe this work as immersive. Interestingly, however, Gabriella Giannachi points out that the world of the hypersurface ‘is not immersive but it simulates immersiveness’ (2004: 95). Whether simulated or not, its effects are ‘real’ enough to immerse the audience inside the world of hypertext as they plunge through the hypersurface.

The world MAOTIK invite you to enter into surrounds it’s audience with a 3-Dimensional virtual world, a world that seems to have no boundaries, no fixed position, and thus removes them from the world they have just left behind, leaving them mimetically engulfed in the virtual. They become decentred within the virtual illusion of infinite time and space. The power of projection is strong enough to temporarily displace this sense of spatial awareness, despite the awareness of the people laying all around them. ‘I have no sense of where “I” am’, writes Clare Bishop, ‘because there is no perceptible space between external objects and myself’ (2005: 82).

Temporarily, the audience’s perception of space becomes dissolved into an ever-changing infinity. However, at times, the audience’s presence is definitely felt; the flashing white light of the shapes contorting and shifting around them ultimately sees to that, and so their presence shifts between modes of identification with their fellow audience members, and complete immersion in virtuality. For in this virtual world, where can the audience grapple onto and gauge their surroundings? Before they can even try, they are plunged into another hallucinogenic environment. I should imagine the dropping pit in their stomachs, that feeling of vertigo as they lay helpless, with a sense of gravity and space pressing down on them. At other times, it stretches out and refracts into infinity leaving them floating in this new universe.

In this environment, however, they are not completely lost, for they are always still part of the real. Their being is never fully dissolved or displaced entirely, for they can still feel the the world around them. It is tangible, they can still grip tightly onto the person’s hand next to them, the floor; but with the overwhelming power of visual and aural data, they can nevertheless feel as though the physical world has retreated away from them. But ‘[t]hrough the hypersurface, the viewer can enter the work of art, be part of it, as well as interact with it. Because the hypersurface is a liminal space, the viewer can double their presence and be in both the real and the virtual environment simultaneously’ (Giannachi 2004: 95). In DROMOS, presence is never fixed, but is always pervasive.

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BISHOP, C. (2005) Installation Art: A Critical History. London: Tate Publishing.

GIANNACHI, G. (2004) Virtual Theatres: An Introduction. London: Routledge.

SMITHSON, R. (1971) A Cinematic Atopia. In: SMITHSON, R. and FLAM, J. (eds.) (1996) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. London: University of California Press.

The hypersurface

I have begun with a literature search in order to examine what researchers have to say about the ‘hypersurface’.

What seems most pertinent is that what sounds like a separate entity, a surface, is actually a liminal space; a meeting-point of real  and virtual. It belongs to both because it can never be one or the other.

In discussing this liminality, Gabriella Giannachi writes: ‘[t]he hypersurface is where the real and the virtual meet each other. It is materiality and textuality; real and representation’ (2004: 95). If the hypersurface is both real and representation, but also liminal, this would imply that the hypersurface can act in a number of ways. Firstly, one could propose that the hypersurface might translate properties of one reality into another, for example, representation (projection) might map the spatial co-ordinates of a space and thus become a virtual representation of the space. Secondly, one might suggest that real (physical space) has the potential to embody qualities of virtual space, and thirdly, one could imagine the potential for each space to fuse together and thus mutually co-depend on one another.

It seems as though all three interactions have the potential to occur within my research. If, as I have suggested, my aim is to create a site-specific mixed-reality performance, it becomes clear that I must consider the potential for each reality, both church and projection, to contribute towards a new fused totality, whereby the two cannot function separately without the other and consequently become ontologically fused with one another. If, as suggested, the projection has the potential to hybridise the temporality of real and representation, then it would appear as though the fusion in question is perhaps the most desirable outcome of the performance project.

However, this does not mean that the performance would, at all times, operate through mutual co-dependency of both real and representation. In outlining my theme, I propose that the virtual, in seeking to transport the audience to a fluid and intertextual spatiotemporal reality, can only do so by firstly mapping the properties of the physical space. Using this as a point of reference, representation can thus evolve to embody its true virtual qualities, but would always still embody those of the real space. It is the projector that causes the space to transform, and also vice versa-

-for the physical space cannot appear to have been augmented or mixed with the reality of the projector’s virtual space. ‘Hypersurfaces are places of exchange, fleeting intertextual strata in which dialectical opposites interact and continuously contaminate one another,’ writes Giannachi, in discussing the interdependency of the hypersurface. ‘As part of the real, they are bound to materiality’ (2004: 99). So it becomes clear that the hypersurface is always bound to materiality, and in this way, can never really depart entirely from it. An oscillation between the three aforementioned relationships becomes clear when one considers the essential relationship the virtual has with the material.

In the physical space of the proposed church, for example, Stephen Parella points out that when the real and the virtual ‘appear in architecture […], the co-presence of both material and image upon an architectural surface/membrane/substrate is such that neither the materiality nor the image dominates the problematic’ (1998: 13).

It is through practice, that I will fully be able to examine this concept…

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GIANNACHI, G. (2004) Virtual Theatres: An Introduction. London: Routledge.

PARRELLA, S.(1998) Hypersurface Architecture. Bognor Regis: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.