"Osmose" (1994-1995) by Char Davies

Real-time video capture of immersive environment "Osmose", during a fly-through performance at the Musée d'art contemporain, Montréal, August 1995.

Osmose (1995) is an immersive interactive virtual-reality environment installation with 3D computer graphics and interactive 3D sound, a head-mounted display and real-time motion tracking based on breathing and balance. Osmose is a space for exploring the perceptual interplay between self and world, i.e., a place for facilitating awareness of one's own self as consciousness embodied in enveloping space.

Immersion in Osmose begins with the donning of the head-mounted display and motion-tracking vest. The first virtual space 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 in a forest. There are a dozen world-spaces in Osmose, most based on metaphorical aspects of nature. These include Clearing, Forest, Tree, Leaf, Cloud, Pond, Subterranean Earth, and Abyss. There is also a substratum, Code, which contains much of the actual software used to create the work, and a superstratum, Text, a space consisting of quotes from the artist and excerpts of relevant texts on technology, the body and nature. Code and Text function as conceptual parentheses around the worlds within.

Through use of their own breath and balance, immersants are able to journey anywhere within these worlds as well as hover in the ambiguous transition areas in between. After fifteen minutes of immersion, the LifeWorld appears and slowly but irretrievably recedes, bringing the session to an end.

Artist website.

"Videoplace '88" (1988) by Myron Krueger

Krueger’s VIDEOPLACE environment contains video screens that respond to the visitor. Since 1970 he developed a series of environments that expressed his concept of "artificial reality" through telepresence, interactivity, and other key concepts.

This documentary was produced by the Museum of Natural History, Vernon.

"The Interactive Movie Map: A Surrogate Travel System" (1981)

This documents work begun in 1977 with the interactive video Aspen Movie Map, which allows the participant to take a journey through Aspen, Colorado, based on pre-recorded video clips sourced from laserdisc. Developed by Andrew Lippman and team at MIT.

"Ephemere" (1997-1998) by Char Davies

Ephémère is iconography evolved through Davies' long-standing practice as a painter, and, as in Osmose, is grounded in 'nature' as metaphor: archetypal elements of root, rock, and stream etc. recur throughout. In Ephémère however, this iconographic repertoire is extended to include body organs, blood vessels and bones, suggesting a symbolic correspondence between the chthonic presences of the interior body and the subterranean earth.

While Osmose consisted of nearly a dozen realms situated around a central clearing, Ephémère is structured vertically into three levels: landscape, earth, and interior body. The body functions as the metaphoric substratum under the fecund earth and the lush bloomings and witherings of the land.

Ephémère is also structured temporally. Even as the immersant roams among all three realms, no realm remains the same. The landscape changes continually, passing through cycles of dawn, day, evening and night, from the pale of winter through spring and summer to the climatic decay of autumn. While the participant may spend an entire session in one realm, it is more likely that they will pass constantly between them, immersed in transformation.

Artist website.