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char davies - osmose and ephémère

Osmose, 1995
Ephémère, 1998
Immersive virtual environments with stereoscopic 3D computer graphics, spatialised sound and real time interaction
colour
Collection: the artist
Courtesy: the artist

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contents:   essay  |  artist's bio  |  artist's statement

Osmose, 1995

Osmose (1995) is an immersive virtual environment with stereoscopic 3D computer graphics, spatialised sound and real time interaction. The interface consists of a stereoscopic head-mounted display and real-time motion tracking based on breath and balance. There are nearly a dozen world-spaces in Osmose, most based on metaphorical aspects of nature. Immersants are able to journey anywhere within these worlds, as well as hover in the ambiguous transition areas.

The first realm encountered is a three-dimensional Cartesian grid, which functions as an orientation space. With the immersant's first breaths, the grid gives way to a clearing, surrounded by a forest. It is possible to enter the clearing's single tree and the interior of its leaves, float through the neverending forest, or descend into subterranean depths among translucent roots and rocks. One can also sink through the pond into an oceanic abyss, or rise above the clearing into cloud. Two additional realms function as conceptual parentheses around the work: the substratum 'Code' located beneath the earth's surface which contains much of the actual software used to create the work; and the superstratum 'Text', located above the cloud and consisting of excerpts of relevant texts on technology, the body and nature.

The sounds in Osmose were sampled from a male and female voice uttering phonetics, then digitally processed and localised in three dimensions. The sound is generated on the fly, in real time, responding, like the visuals, to changes in the immersant's head and body position, direction and speed. After 15 minutes of immersion, a symbolic life-world appears and then irretrievably recedes, bringing the session to an end.

Osmose was named after 'osmosis' from 'osmos' (Greek) meaning 'to push' - a biological process involving passage from one side of a semi-permeable cellular membrane to another. Osmose, as metaphor, is about longing: for transcendence of difference through mutual absorption; for dissolution of boundaries; for overcoming estrangement between the self and other; and for the soulful intermingling of the self and the world.

Ephémère, 1998

Ephémère (1998) is an immersive virtual environment with real-time display of 3D computer graphics and interactive 3D localised sound. The interface consists of a stereoscopic head-mounted display and real-time motion tracking based on breath and balance. Like Osmose, Ephémère's iconography is grounded in 'nature' as metaphor. In Ephémère however, Osmose's repertoire of trees, rocks and streams is extended to include body organs, arteries and bones, intended to suggest a symbolic correspondence between body and earth. Ephémère is structured into three levels: landscape, subterranean earth, and a substratum of interior body flesh.

Ephémère is also structured temporally: its landscape changes continually, passing through diurnal/nocturnal cycles and seasonal transformation; its subterranean boulders give way to body organs then, in turn, transform to bone. Throughout the immersive experience, the various elements come into being, linger, and pass away; the timing of their emergence and withdrawal depends upon the immersant's position, proximity, slowness of movement, and steadiness/duration of gaze, as well as the passage of time. For example, in the landscape boulders open when approached slowly, and beneath the earth's surface seeds germinate when gazed upon, inviting entry into the luminous interior space of their blooming. The river (also manifested as an underground stream or vein/artery) has a gravitational pull that propels the immersant along while randomly transforming the surrounding spatial realm.

Such responsive transformations are also aural, and the sound - sampled from viola and animal and environmental noises, as well as simple signals - is in a constant state of flux. Finally, depending on the immersant's whereabouts after a dozen or so minutes within the work, there are multiple endings, whereby the rich flows of colour, texture and sound begin to fade, leaving only autumn leaves, embers or ashes drifting in empty space.

Ephémère, like Osmose, was inspired by an actual place, whose elements of rocks and trees, ponds and streams, re-occur in Davies' work like apparitions. On this land, however, fewer songbirds are returning in the spring, frogs and salamanders have less young, and the maple trees are dying because of global warming or acid rain from smelters in the American Midwest. In some ways, Ephémère is a lament, an elegy, not only for the ephemerality of our own lives, but also for the passing of the natural  world as we have known it.

1954 - Born in Toronto, Canada; lives and works near Montreal, Canada, and in San Francisco, USA

Canadian artist Char Davies studied art and philosophy at Bennington College, Vermont, before obtaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, in 1978. She began investigating the themes of nature, sensory perception and space in her early paintings before turning to 3D computer technology in the mid 80s. In 1987 she became a founding director of Softimage, now one of the largest developers of digital animation software, and began working with the software that led to her creation of the immersive virtual environments Osmose and Ephémère. Integrating sophisticated interactive technology with stereoscopic 3D computer graphics and spatialised sound, these works have been internationally exhibited including at the National Gallery of Canada, London's Barbican Art Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and at the Biennale of Electronic Arts in Perth. In June 2002, Davies received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the University of Victoria, Canada. She has published numerous papers and her work has been covered extensively in the international press as well as being the subject of numerous scholarly essays and documentaries.

Website link

Char Davies' website
http://www.immersence.com/

Osmose

For a long time, I have been interested in conveying a sense of being enveloped in an all-encompassing, all-surrounding space, a subjective embodied experience that is very different from the Cartesian notion of absolute, empty, abstract, xyz space. As an artist, I am interested in recreating a sense of lived, felt space that encircles one with an enveloping horizon and presses closely upon the skin, a sensuous space, subjectively, bodily perceived. Some might interpret this as a uterine or womb-like space. Perhaps the desire to recreate, to communicate this sensibility, my sensibility, of such space is because I am female: I would leave that up to interpreters of my work. I think it might have more to do with having spent so much time alone in nature.

This desire, that is the desire to convey a sense of spatial envelopment, is what led me to abandon painting in the mid-1980s and become involved with 3D computer technology - because I imagined it might free me from the limitations of the 2D picture plane, and allow me to effectively work in an enveloping three-dimensional space. Once I was making images with 3D software, I wanted to bring my audience with me into that space, and so I turned to the medium of immersive virtual space - or what many people call virtual reality. For me the all-enveloping, immersive aspect of Virtual Reality (VR), which I believe is only possible with a head-mounted display at this point, is key. I'm not interested in the technology per se, but in the kind of spatial perceptual experience it gives access to.

Gigliotti, C. 2002. 'Reverie, Osmose and Ephémère', n.paradoxa, Vol. 9 (Eco)Logical, 2002, pp. 64-73
http://www.immersence.com/publications/CGigliotti-nparadoxa-N.html

Ephémère

Osmose and Ephémère are immersive and interactive virtual reality environments. These works are known for their embodying interface, painterly aesthetic and themes of nature. They are the most recent fruits of an artistic project I have been engaged in for almost 20 years, which has encompassed painting, film and 3D computer graphics and animation.

The impulse behind this project has been to communicate an intensified experience of being embodied in the space-time of the living world. Osmose and Ephémère are my most recent attempts to distill and amplify the sensations and emotions of being conscious, embodied and mortal, i.e. how it feels to be alive here now among all this, immersed in the vast, multi-channeled flow of life through space and time. In these works I seek to remind people of their connection to the natural (rather than man-made) environment not only biologically, but spiritually and psychologically, as regenerative source and mythological ground.

Judy Malloy (ed.), Women Art & Technology, MIT Press, Boston, 1998