Jeffrey
Shaw with Agnes Hegedues and Bernd Lintermann
1996
Computergraphic installation
ConFIGURING the CAVE is a computer based interactive video
installation that assumes a set of technical and pictorial procedures
to identify various paradigmatic conjunctions of body and space. The
work utilises the CAVE technology stereographic virtual reality environment
with contiguous projections on three walls and the floor. The user
interface is a near life-size wooden puppet that is formed like the
prosaic artists' mannequin; this figure can be handled by the viewers
to control real time transformations of the computer generated imagery
and the sound composition.
ConFIGURING the CAVE is constituted by seven differentiated
pictorial domains. Movement of the puppets body and limbs dynamically
modulate various parameters in the image and sound generating software,
while particular postures of the puppet cause specific visual events
to occur. Most significantly it is the action of moving the puppet's
hands to cover and then uncover its eyes, which causes the transitions
from one pictorial domain to the next.
ConFIGURING the CAVE embodies a meta-language of functional
relationships between corporeal and spatial co-ordinates. These relationships
are both physical and conceptual, reflecting the traditional attitude
in many cultures of conjecturing the body as the locus and measure
of all things. At the same time it puts that tradition in a post-modern
exigency which exposes the fragile covariance of a representative
surrogate body now located in a measureless space of reticular forms.
Credits:
Authors: Agnes Hegedus, Bernd Lintermann, Jeffrey Shaw
Application Software: Bernd Lintermann
Music Composition: Les Stuck
Motion Analysis for Music: Jonathan Bachrach
Visualisation Technology: CAVE™
Production Management: Boctok Tokyo, David D’Heilly, with support from ZKM Karlsruhe
Commissioned for the permanent collection of the ICC InterCommunication Centre, Tokyo.
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