Art review of Applied Interactive and (art)n's VR installaton, Special Treatment

Exhibition Review by David Schmidgall:
"SPECIAL TREATMENT" AT APPLIED INTERACTIVES AND (ART)n LABORATORY,
6th FLOOR OF THE G2 BUILDING, 847 W. JACKSON BLVD, CHICAGO,
JANUARY 7 - 8, 2005

Special Treatment (VR installation, 2005) Applied Interactives
in collaboration with (art)n

Applied Interactives is an artist-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in Chicago in 2001. Its primary mission is to propagate immersive and interactive technologies and art into the exhibition spaces of galleries and contemporary art museums as well as into the hands of individual artists. AI is composed of students, faculty, and alumni of University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Columbia College Chicago and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). (Art)n was formed by Ellen Sandor in 1983 with her peers from the SAIC. They created immersive, sculptural mixed-media installations that inspired the invention of Virtual Photography (PHSColograms). (Art)n's works are in numerous galleries, museums and private collections

The conflation of technology and art into new media, particularly virtual reality, produces an art form that holds high promise but often fails to deliver. Art has long striven to create transcendent viewer experiences, and virtual reality holds out the tantalizing possibility of achieving such with convincing immersive technology. Interactive graphics and sound can combine to simulate environments into which the viewer can mentally project herself. When the effect is convincing enough, the medium becomes transparent, and the viewer/participant essentially forgets she is in an artificially constructed world and for a time figuratively exists within the work. This transparence is vitally important for the work to succeed. It is not enough for the work to be interesting, technically admirable, or even thought provoking. For better or worse, the promise of virtual reality raises the bar for audience expectations of interactivity and immersion, and for a work to be a success artistically, the illusionary world it creates must be both conceptually compelling and technically convincing. The latest work by Applied Interactives, Special Treatment, which opened January 7 for a two day show at Chicago's (art)n Laboratory, is in many ways a virtuosic technical achievement. However, because of technical and conceptual problems and shortcomings in the work's deployment it fails to achieve its stated intent.

Special Treatment (VR installation, 2005) Applied Interactives
in collaboration with (art)n

According to Applied Interactives' artist statement, "Special Treatment is a virtual reality installation piece that uses the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp as the setting to explore the concepts of persistence and memory." Deployed at the far end of (art)n's space, the installation is displayed on AI's virtual reality portal, a large passive-stereo screen that further incorporates spatialized audio to create an immersive experience. Viewers wear special glasses and headphones to augment the 3D effects. There is a hand-held control that allows one viewer to interact with the piece; all others are left to follow her navigations and interactions.

The work opens with a train ride in a cattle car to the concentration camp. The participant is tracked through sensors, and as she raises her hand holding the control the motion is recreated in the virtual space; a hand appears and reaches toward spectral images that advance and recede. Light and sound add to the illusion; ghostly bits of speech move perceptually from one side of the room to the other. One can almost imagine the rumbling of the railcar.

Special Treatment (VR installation, 2005) Applied Interactives
in collaboration with (art)n

Upon arriving at the camp, the participant finds herself approaching the grounds of the notorious Birkenau concentration camp. Applied Interactives states there are twelve thematic memories that refer to certain aspects of the camp. Each is located in a physical component of the camp; the crematorium, a guard tower, the intake desks, prisoner barracks, etc. Audio of menacing guards, gunshots and humming electric fences punctuate the created environment. Purportedly each participant's interaction alters the piece, thereby changing its memory and the subsequent experience of the next participant. The participant can navigate through the grounds, and the intention of the piece is that she will encounter and experience this space in ways that will create connections between the memories of the past, her own memories and those of participants yet to come. Escape through the fence, rescue by Allied soldiers, recollections of mass graves or thoughts about the crematorium end the piece (as does the seemingly inevitable system crash).

Technically, there's much to admire. The graphic environment, while simplified and bordering on cartoon-like, gives an adequate sense of place and atmosphere. The participant is able to navigate through this space by means of a hand-held device, encountering three-dimensional representations of the grounds and artifacts of the prison camp. Perspective and spatial relationships change with the virtual position of the participant, while audio events reinforce the experience. Further, the participant can interact with specific structures, objects and places within the environment.

However, there are limits to this interactivity, and so limits to the depth of immersion and degree of transparency. Because one cannot interact with anything save what the programmers have deemed interactive, the illusion of autonomous immersion is destroyed, and the relation of the participant to the work becomes more like that of game player to game. Here the simplified graphic environment contributes to this unfortunate association; there is not enough visual verisimilitude to carry the burden of transparency alone. Further, once the work is experienced as a kind of video game the stated intent of the work is subverted, for it's impossible to feel one is constructing or experiencing a collective narrative when one is merely searching for the hidden areas of interactivity. At this juncture, one expects to see a score keeping display appear, and any meaningful association with the experience of a horrifically real site of human extermination is lost.

Special Treatment (VR installation, 2005) Applied Interactives
in collaboration with (art)n

So while the piece has its successful aspects, not the least of which is the technical expertise on display, it ultimately fails its expressed intentions. Applied Interactives' artist statement further states that "(this) immersive experience allows each participant to inhabit (emphasis mine) the scene of these events, (leaving) the evidence of their own actions and memories…." It is in the work's promise of inhabitation and interaction that it ultimately fails, partially because of technical limits we have seen. But there are conceptual problems as well. There are epistemological conceptions inherent to virtual reality that lead to this failure, primarily the Cartesian conception of the mind as separate from the body. It is this conception that is the foundation of virtual reality, for virtual reality's raison d'être is to project us mentally into a created artificial place distinct from the place inhabited by the body.

There is a long history of artistic attempts at creating what Oliver Grau terms telepresence. In his essay "The History of Telepresence: Automata, Illusion, and The Rejection of the Body," from The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet (Ken Goldberg, ed.), Grau states that telepresence enables a person to be present in three different places simultaneously: a) in the location determined by the body's position in time and space, b) by cognitive and perceptual means in the artificial, simulated image space, and c) by means of teleaction, or a manipulation of reality, whether virtual or actual, that is effected by one's own movement. For example, leaving footprints in the sand of a virtual beach as one walks along the shore would be an instance of telepresence. An even greater degree of telepresence would be to remotely manipulate a robotic device having actual presence at an actual beach that left physical evidence of your having virtually walked there.

Special Treatment (VR installation, 2005) Applied Interactives
in collaboration with (art)n

Grau asserts that telepresence has deep roots in intellectual history, and that it unites thematically the concepts of automation (or a search for artificial life), artistic illusion, and a Cartesian view of the self as mind distinct from body that reveres the former and rejects the latter. He contends that there is a long tradition of a search for and attempts to create virtual realities, and that this desire has been a powerful motivator in both art and technology.

In the case of automata, or the conception of humans as machines, Grau demonstrates there is a lineage of attempts to create surrogates for humans reaching into antiquity. As early as the second century a pneumatic model of the human body had been conceived by the physician Galen. By the seventeenth century mechanistic surrogates for members of royalty had been designed and deployed in England. Grau believes that the urge to create these artificial, mechanistic life forms is a dream of overcoming our physical limitations and of achieving immortality through machines. In the case of Special Treatment, where the source reality is the long closed death camps of Nazi occupied Poland, it is ironic that while we can in a sense project ourselves into that virtual world, it is a world where death took on terrifying machine efficiency and indifference to human suffering.

Special Treatment (VR installation, 2005) Applied Interactives
in collaboration with (art)n

Grau further contends that the seemingly new phenomenon of virtual reality has historical artistic antecedents. He finds that the isolation of viewers from outside impressions allows for a controlled environment that surrounds them with spatially and temporally illusory stimuli, and that such controlled, illusory environments were conceived and constructed long before the computer age. From immersive 1st century B.C. Pompeiian cult frescoes to the Sacrimonti, dioramatic stations of the cross in sixteenth century Italy, artists have sought to create environments that virtually place the viewer in another time and place. Even then, artists believed that direct experience with other realities could inform a viewer more fully than could other art forms. In the case of the Sacrimonti, it was believed experiencing such spectacles could serve as a sort of shield against the approaching Reformation, enveloping spectators with powerful imagery and manipulating their inner visual memory. One can easily see that Special Treatment and its intent to create new understanding of the Birkenau camps are but the latest in a long line of such artistic and technological endeavors.

Grau's third component of telepresence (again, the attempt to effect presence in distant places) is the Western tradition of rejection of the body in favor of the mind. The Cartesian concept of dualism, of mind over body, of "the ghost in the machine," has direct links to early Christian thought, as evidenced by Christ's immortality demonstrated in the Ascension. Art has attempted through the use of technology to likewise triumph over the body's mortality. With the conceptual base of the mind being separate from the body, it follows that if the mind can be projected into an artificial, mechanistic space, that immortality and omnipotence can be achieved. The Futurist's vision of a metallic body is a not too distant example. Through telecommunications, the possibility of projecting human sensory abilities to distant places became a reality. It follows naturally that this ability to sense remotely would be coupled with an increasingly convincing ability to create artificial representations of reality, thereby bringing into being virtual worlds that are affected by and react to our presence.

And thus we are brought back to Special Treatment. The artists and technicians of Applied Interactives have brought cutting edge technology to bear in their attempt to place us in the space and time of Birkenau, but ultimately the experience is not one of great power and resonance. Instead, it leaves one feeling rather unsatisfied and unmoved. The problem, I think, is that while it certainly weds state of the art graphics with a compelling subject matter, it is the fundamental conception of the separation of mind and body that precipitates the work's ultimate failure. As Simon Penny asserts in "The Virtualization of Art Practice; Body Knowledge and the Engineering Worldview" (Art Journal, Fall 1997), not all knowledge is centered in the brain. The traditional, Western, Cartesian model privileges the mind over body. But we experience the world as a body existing in that world, not as a disembodied mind observing the world remotely. It is that Cartesian split that hampers Special Treatment.

Special Treatment (VR installation, 2005) Applied Interactives
in collaboration with (art)n

Applied Interactive's artist statement expresses the intention to explore the concepts of persistence and memory. Here, memory seems to be thought of as purely mediated mental cognitive experiences. From the safety and relative comfort of an art gallery a privileged participant navigates game-like through a reconstructed model of a Nazi death camp. Theoretically, as she does, she encounters situations and conditions experienced and remembered by survivors of those camps. However, she experiences them through telepresence, as a disembodied conscious entity acting remotely on and in an artificial world. At every level her engagement is based in mind-centered cognitive perception; she experiences this world as thought, as dream, as unreal. Because she experiences these reconstructed artifacts virtually, she cannot possibly approach even a tangential approximation of what the true experience was. She is given the illusion of reality. But it is a poor illusion, for while it holds out the promise of immersion and virtual experience, it cannot offer the bodily experience that is crucial for an understanding of the real. There is no sense of taste, of smell, of touch, of physical investment and its inherent danger. There is no sense of the presence of others occupying this world. It is remote, aloof, uninvested, cerebral, virtual. It can no more create the experience of being physically, powerlessly bodily captive in the presence of grave danger than can a video of childbirth recreate or approximate the visceral experience of pregnancy or labor. And it is, as Penny argues, this very bodily experience that is essential and fundamental to how we know the world:

I want in all seriousness to argue that I "know" with my arms and with my stomach. To maintain that the activity we call "knowing" is isolated to a subsection of the body is folly. …(First), the redefinition of human capability in terms of the computer resoundingly reinforces the separation of mind and body. And second, because dance, sculpture, painting and the variety of other fine and performing arts are premised on bodily training, bodily knowledge that implicitly contradicts the mind/body duality (Art Journal, Fall 1997.)

Penny argues that the rise of computer based simulation software has reduced the multiplicity of sensory modes humans use to engage and experience the world into one, the compartmentalized mind. This destroys what he terms cognitive diversity, the ability to know the world experientially through whole body knowledge. Special Treatment appears to circumvent this singularity of sensory experience by its promise of randomness and interactivity. But the promise and illusion of interactivity does not deliver what the body and mind together know to be reality. There are by necessity limits to the degree of freedom that a programmed environment can allow a participant. She is always limited in her penetration of that virtual space and in her ability to project herself throughout that space in any meaningful way. This technical limitation further reduces any illusion of presence and reality that is promised by the work. Applied Interactives asserts that their installation is not virtual reality, but an interpreted reality, one that allows viewers to create their own personal narrative. Arguably this is so, for as a participant navigates throughout the piece she is constructing an experience, consciously or not. But fairly or not, the public's expectation of virtual reality is for an immersive and transcendent experience that the prescribed nature of Special Treatment cannot deliver. And even if these technical limitations were resolved, it's doubtful that the result would be different in any meaningful way, because of the nature of the separation and compartmentalization of mind and body that's epistemologically at the core of the concept of virtual reality. While Special Treatment's modes of interactivity suggest that more of the body is involved in experiencing the death camp environment than other media can make possible, because it relies on the concept of telepresence, of projecting the disembodied mind into a virtual world, it cannot by definition achieve the kind of bodily experience it claims for itself. With Special Treatment, to quote Oliver Grau, "the experience conveyed by machines replaces the real body, and with it embodied experience."

Special Treatment (VR installation, 2005) Applied Interactives
in collaboration with (art)n

Finally, Special Treatment suffers from exhibition difficulties. Marshall McLuhan asserted in The Medium is the Massage that each medium has as its content the medium that precedes it. In the case of virtual reality, that medium is film; illusory, transcendent, immersive. Like film, virtual reality attempts to create an artificial world where we willingly suspend disbelief and enter god-like into that hyper-real space. But where film enjoys a form allowing both an immersive environment and willing submission to the stimuli and narrative selected by the author of the work, virtual reality surrenders control to the viewer in an attempt to more fully realize total immersion and verisimilitude. Ironically, it is this very surrender that is so problematic for interactive pieces, for the desire to create transcendent immersion and true interactivity can preclude the presence of a compelling narrative, a narrative that is often crucial for a work's success. Further, film is usually and most successfully presented and experienced in venues specifically designed for their exhibition. The very structure of the theater works to reinforce the experience, from the architectural tropes of movie house design to the placement of the audience in a dark room facing a screen. The structure and related experiences of movie going (concessions, ticket buying, dating) work together to frame and shape the expectations of the audience and both contextualize the work and provide an environment where willing suspension of disbelief can occur. Similarly, virtual reality requires contextualizing and an exhibition space that is conducive to audience immersion and transcendence.

Special Treatment's deployment at the far end of (art)n's space, a long and narrow gallery in the 847 Jackson building, works against its success. Given that transparency is vitally important for an interactive work to be truly transcendent, it's difficult to imagine an environment less conducive than an opening night crowded with patrons juggling drinks and hors d'oeuvres, elbowing for space and shouting across the room. An environment one expects at an opening night to be sure, but not one that lends itself to a thoughtful and undisturbed encounter with a piece of art that requires by its nature a space isolated from outside stimuli, preferably one enclosed and structured. For Special Treatment, indeed any virtual reality work that intends total immersion within it, it's imperative that the participant can interact with and experience the work undisturbed or distracted by stimuli that are incongruent with the created virtual world. At (art)n, both participant and viewer were made constantly aware of the actual physical space and the presence of others not within the virtual world because of the lack of visual and auditory isolation. Had the work been presented within a separate room with controlled access, or even deployed behind a dividing screen or wall, there would have been more possibility for a truly immersive experience that might have furthered its intention and success. Further, the party atmosphere decontextualizes the work in ways that are impossible to overcome. It's difficult at best to approach this work in a manner its subject matter dictates in such a festive environment. More effort in the future to stage and contextualize Special Treatment would further advance the work's success.

The desire to experience presence in other environments, to project oneself mentally into distinct and separate worlds has long been a goal of the creative arts. With the advent of increasingly powerful and sophisticated computer technology, the goal appears to be in sight, indeed within reach. If technology makes possible the creation of environments with such verisimilitude that the phenomenon of transparency is achieved, then the viewer/participant can experience more fully an alternate, virtual reality. However, there remain epistemological concepts in virtual reality that can preclude such immersion, foremost of which is the Cartesian split between mind and body. From this concept comes the conceit that an extension of mental presence can substitute for a whole body experience, that the body is so much meat, an unnecessary burden to experiential freedom. While virtual reality applications are increasingly able to extend more of the body's senses into a virtual space, thereby creating a more realistic illusion of presence, in many cases technical, exhibition and conceptual difficulties prevent this from occurring. Despite impressive technical expertise and admirable artistic goals, the latest installation from Applied Interactives, Special Treatment, ultimately fails its intent for participants to inhabit and experience the remembered and reconstructed world of Birkenau.

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David Schmidgall is a recent M.F.A. graduate from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.