Tilt Brush painting: Chronotopic adventures in a physical-virtual threshold

New forms of technology such as Virtual Reality (VR) bring visible changes to the temporal-spatial structures used to represent information and contribute towards a rethinking of the vocabularies of spatiality and spatial experience in painting practice. The History of Painting encompasses a range of techniques intended to create visual 3D illusions from a 2D plane. Virtual technologies present an opportunity to rethink the conventional structures and materials in the discipline of painting, forcing a reconsideration of paintings in, and as, space to be explored. VR painting app, Tilt Brush, enables users to create 3D imagery via a simple controller that mimics the gestures of painting, materializing a range of brushes, colours and paint effects. Tilt Brush paintings call not only on different making practices but also means of viewing and reading. In this article I draw on Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope to interrogate how time and space are arranged to constitute the practice of Tilt Brush painting and as a means to understanding the experience of a VR canvas as a space existing both outside and inside a tangible environment. Rethinking notions of time and space in and around VR painting presents the opportunity to disrupt a representational logic and to consider the embodied relationship of painter to painting as a means of producing and probing the threshold between the physical and the virtual in VR painting.