Ch. 28 "Changing Space": Virtual Reality in Film

 

Charlotte Davies - Éphémère, Responsive Environment 1998:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oa_aiw7yhp

 The Virtual Reality Device from Disclosure:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFkyV7d5t8o 

The essay, “Changing Space: Virtual Reality as an Arena of Embodied Being” mentions about the Canadian artist, Charlotte Davies and her digital media project, Osmoses. Deriving from the term, ‘osmosis’ meaning the spontaneous movement of molecules from one space to another, osmoses is the spontaneous movement of human subjects from one space to another. As seen the first given clip above, Osmoses is a computer program in which external human subjects viewing it in reality get submerged into an alternate reality on screen. Here, the complex images and sounds transport the viewer into a space that breaks away from the fixed ontologies of reality (narratives, social structures, physics, geometry, etc.) that can inhibit/control his or her subjectivity. As she said herself, “her intent is to “reaffirm the role of the subjectivity experienced, ‘felt’ body in cyberspace" (294). In other words, the goal of Osmoses is to externalize the viewer’s internal thoughts and emotions in a fictionalized space outside reality.

But does this virtual reality completely breaks away from reality in film? Well, while looking at the second clip from the sci-fi movie, Disclosure, Michael Douglass’s character is physically and mentally transported to various spaces while wearing some type of technological headgear. This human subject on screen is able to maintain balance and existence in spaces where the architecture of buildings constantly change. Unlike in Osmoses where there are no human perspectives, this film identifies the character’s physical nature in the given space. This scene in Disclosure then seems to prioritize the human perspective over the space, making the environment in which the subject moves throughout appear very artificial and synthetic. But the spaces in both Osmoses and Disclosure seem to originate from that of reality, for while one inhabits underwater plants, the other inhabits rigid walls and columns. So they can each be taken from the perspective of a scuba diver or an architect. In either case, both spaces to some degree depict aspects of reality and human experiences so that the outside viewer can connect and understand the given content, even though the spaces are artificially and technologically created by human programmers like Davies.