Virtual Reality and Performance

This article will set out three things: a description and contextualization of art work I will call virtual reality/performance; a presentation in some detail of a recent manifestation of a virtual reality/performance work; and a perspective on why choreographers and dancers remain largely absent from these developments.

Virtual Reality/Performance Work

Virtual reality/performance work tends to engage actively with open forms of audience participation and interaction; site-specific responses to space (whether virtual or actual) and the possibilities inherent in discontinuous, gaming, interactive and user/participant-led time frames. Historically, the concept of virtual reality/performance work draws on several genres of art work, i.e., Happenings, performance and live art, participatory art, interactive art, installation art, media and communication art, etc.

The "virtual reality/performance work" invites the audience/viewers/users to participate in or interact with an art work that involves being able to navigate freely "within" a three-dimensional environment created by computer software. This entails the use of sensors and devices to register input from the user/audience member to be integrated with the computer generated 3-D environment. An input device can range from something as simple as the familiar mouse or keyboard to more complex apparatuses that are able to register movement of other parts of the body in space and transmit this information (often position and orientation, but other possibilities are pressure, acceleration, and proximity) to the computer. Common to most virtual reality/performance work is the notion of building a customized input device that becomes a part of the work itself. The computer takes the input information and more or less immediately calculates a perspective within the 3-D environment and renders and displays this as "output" to the user/viewer/audience member via projection devices.

This combination of activities (input, calculation, output) working together may take different forms, and these essentially range from the popularized Head Mounted Display (developed from ideas pioneered by Ivan Sutherland at the University of Utah in the late 1960s), which uses different left and right eye views to create the illusion of 3-D, to the CAVE. The CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, developed in 1992 at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, University of Illinois) is an immersive 3-D environment that dispenses with the bulky Head Mounted Display. ¹ One walks standing up into a 10 by 10 foot room wearing a special pair of active stereo glasses and carrying a mouse "wand" that interacts with the space. There is an input device in the form of a "head tracker" that provides information about the user/audience member's position in the space. The software synchronizes all the devices and calculates the correct perspective for each wall from the point of view of the user. Four projectors send the computer-generated images onto three walls and the floor.

Everything about these technologies of virtual reality emphasize audience interaction, immersion, or participation over watching from a single vantage point. Thus, they align themselves with the formative cultural movements of the 1950s when interdisciplinary experimentation challenged the borders of conventional arts disciplines and their presentation and sought to break down barriers between performer and audience, maker and viewer. A historically recognized marker of this rupture was the event (untitled) organized by John Cage in the summer of 1952 at Black Mountain College and featuring a radical interdisciplinary juxtaposition of dance, visual art, music/sound, and poetry and text readings. Allan Kaprow's Happenings of the later 1950s and early 1960s extended this experiment to include "disparate and discontinuous events and spaces" and the notion of events "for performers only"—in other words, participatory performance work. ² The anti-establishment ideologies of the period that may have motivated these early pioneers disappeared, but interdisciplinary practices remained. Interdisciplinary art makers and groups continued to work with a growing range of media and communication tools, challenged the traditional locations or sites for performance and further explored the...