Carl Francis DiSalvo, Artist, Shock of the View Co-Director

Hisham's Bizri's and Maria Roussou's Mitologies (1997) (http://www.evl.uic.edu/mitologies/index.html) is a CAVE* based virtual reality piece in which the participant explores complex labyrinths, interacts with curious objects, and engages archetypal myths as sources of experience. As the lights dim and the images blur into focus on the CAVE. walls, the participant falls into a fantasy space, where highly rendered and textured graphics, 3D sounds, and the relative freedom of movement are woven into an experience of total immersion.

Mitologies is based upon a variety of texts, including the Cretan myth of the Minotaur, Dante's Inferno, Borges' Library of Babel, the woodcuts of Durer, and Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. The narrative form of Mitologies is a fragmenting and re-structuring of these texts into an experience of sensual inquiry into history, literature, mythology, art, and music, without "taking a didactic or encyclopedic stance."1 This inquiry is played out through both spatial navigation and interaction with objects within the virtual space. The participant begins the journey upon a boat, which takes them (without any interaction on their part) down a river, guided by a statue, that has been hinted by the artists to be representing Virgil accompanying Dante into the Inferno. The journey down the river ends by leaving the participant in front of a cathedral that is based upon original sketches by da Vinci that were never executed in real space. The participant now begins to actively participate in the piece. They explore and experience the great cathedral, and in the process of exploring the great cathedral are eventually led below, to the labyrinth underneath it.

The labyrinth in Mitologies is a complex series of rooms interconnected by tunnels. The participant interacts with objects within each room and makes choices that determine into which room they will next be led. While each room has a distinctive theme, a different scene to be experienced through its space, all of the rooms are intrinsically related to one another in the construction of the overall experience of the piece. Detailed interaction with "curiosities" , objects, and space occur throughout Mitologies. Through these interactions, compounded in intensity by the orchestration of sound and travel through the virtual space, the participant is immersed not only sensually, but conceptually as well, constructing memories and associations within the experience of virtual space, constructing meaning.

Virtual space, as an artistic medium, allows the artist to create experiences of impossibility: experiences that could not be re-created outside of the virtual space. Within the computer, history and physics can be sculpted. We can fly through space and we can experience moments in times one after another which occurred centuries apart, or never occurred at all. Mitologies uses the opportunities provided by the medium of virtual space to construct a series of interactions in conjunction with the intertwined artistic and historical narratives, which, over time, transubstantiate the immateriality of that space into an experience of wonder.

It is difficult in this current cultural milieu to speak of art whose primary success is that of instilling wonder. Perhaps this possibility to instill wonder, to create and experience the impossible, is the profound possibility and challenge of virtual space as an artistic medium. Throughout the interaction with Mitologies an overwhelming sense of awe was experienced. As one explores a da Vinci chapel that only previously existed as a sketch in his notebook, as one marvels and plays with the curiosities within the labyrinth, as one interacts with Death, there is a sense of profound inquiry, a sense of profound play. Different from an extremely engaging movie, within Mitologies the participant actively culls meaning from physical interaction with the space. Unlike an installation, within Mitologies the space in which the participant is interacting with is un-real, and as such this virtual space affords certain possibilities of movement and time that cannot exist outside of it.

The French novelist-philosophical theorist-art critic George Bataille often wrote against the idea of "project," against the idea of working toward any goal other than experiencing the experience itself. To Bataille, it was the experience itself that was of importance, rather than its economy of meaning or agenda. The possibility for experiences of this sort are rare, however, Mitologies presents an opportunity for such an experience. Within Mitologies there is no goal, other than the experiencing of it, which is itself an experience without pragmatic purpose: it is an opportunity to experience myths which have long since been separated from any social function. This is not to say that Mitologies is without meaning. Rather that, meaning within Mitologies is to be found by engaging its texture of texts, by exploration and play through the narratives and the senses, and by wonder and awe, and reflection upon that.

 

.*. The CAVE is a ten by ten foot room constructed of three translucent walls. A rack Onyx with two Infinite reality Engines drives the high resolution stereoscopic images which are rear-projected onto the walls and front-projected onto the floor. Light-weight LCD stereo glasses are worn to mediate the stereoscopic imagery. Attached to the glasses is a location sensor. As the viewer moves within the confines of the CAVE, the correct perspective and stereo projection of the environment are updated. This presents the user with the illusion of walking around or through virtual objects. Four speakers mounted at the corners of the CAVE provide audio. The user interacts with the environment using the 3D wand, a simple tracked input device containing a joystick and three buttons. The wand enables navigation around the virtual world and manipulation of objects within that world. Mitologies also runs on the CAVE's smaller, more portable cousins, the Immersadesk and Immersadesk2.2
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1. Mitologies: Medieval Labyrinth Narratives in Virtual Reality, Maria Roussos and Hisham Bizri, published in Virtual Worlds 98, (Paris: Springer-Verlag, 1998), pp. 373-383.

2. Ibid.