In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art and the Essence of Spatiality
  • Ernestine Daubner (bio)
Laurie McRobert. Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art and the Essence of Spatiality. University of Toronto Press. xiv, 190. $50.00

The milestone virtual reality artworks Osmose (1995) and Ephémère (1998), by world-renowned Canadian artist Char Davies, are not just technologically innovative. They provide an embodied, immersive experience for the visitor that, the artist says, defies Cartesian dualism. By donning a head-mounted display device and a jacket fitted with position detectors, the visitor is able to immerse mind-body in a three-dimensional, visual, and acoustic virtual space in real time. By inhaling or exhaling, the immersant has the impression of rising or falling; and by altering body positions, she or he can effortlessly change directions, first entering an ethereal space of a Cartesian grid, then floating away, flying, or gently jumping through semi-transparent, seemingly liquid, natural worlds: a clearing, a forest, a pond, a subterranean earth. These translucent worlds are not literal or analog images of natural settings; rather, as Davies emphasizes, they are experienced as metaphors of nature, able to change one’s perceptions.

Laurie McRobert, like many immersants, was greatly moved by her experience of Osmose, so much so that she was impelled to explore the implications of such an immersion on the human subject. This book is the result. For insights, the author looks through (and beyond) the lens of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Celebrating Davies’s virtual reality art as heroic, McRobert sees it as a vehicle of truth, ‘introduc[ing] us to a biological version of substantial essence’ where ‘essential spatiality, a spatiality and time different from the Einsteinian relativistic notion of [End Page 462] space and time, can be experienced.’ As the author situates this feeling of ‘essential spatiality’ in one’s physiology, she marvels at the manner in which Davies has ‘intuitively created an immersive dynamic that is destined to end up engaging feelings and the brain’s silent spaces.’ She argues with great conviction that these immersive virtual environments provide ‘a new way to access a higher order of consciousness.’

Circumventing the idea that this is an overly idealist viewpoint, McRobert argues that Davies’s immersive environments are antithetical to techno-romanticism, which represents ‘transcendent disembodied realities.’ This is a characteristic she ascribes to the Australian performance artist Stelarc. Indeed, this artist’s techno-performances and controversial notions of the post-human body, which he describes to be inadequate and obsolete without technological extensions, easily stand in opposition to the work and goals of Davies. Similarly, the embodied experiences of Davies’s immersive environments are contrasted with the disembodiment inherent in ‘the essence of cyberspace,’ to which the author devotes a chapter. Davies’s virtual art, McRobert reminds us, is also distinct from any traditional artwork that stirs emotion, aesthetic or otherwise:

Osmose and Ephémère become a way of cultivating an important intuitive dimension that is mainly lost to us except when we dream . . . open[ing] up new insights into self, or nature, or ‘being’; they can provide us with a way of understanding our unconsciousness, what the basis of our emotions are, what instincts are all about . . . and their dreamlike qualities can serve as vehicles that confirm that Jung’s archetypes can be understood as instincts.

Despite such comparative assessments on the implications of Davies’s virtual environments on human consciousness, McRobert does not contextualize Osmose and Ephémère within new media art production. Given the broad range of interactive electronic art, including scores of virtual reality artworks created by other artists in the last few decades, doing so might have enhanced this author’s presentation. It would have been of particular interest for her to acknowledge the discourses on the body and embodiment so prevalent in writings on such new media art, some of which counter the philosophical positions discussed in this book. Rather, Davies’s virtual reality artworks are presented as being unique, which, in certain ways, they of course are. It is evident that Laurie McRobert, so impressed by her experience of Char Davies’s immersive environments, would not have wanted it any other...

pdf

Share