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.
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.
throughthehypersurface 