Virtual Creativity - Current Issue

This article proposes a reframing of the contemporary media Narcissus through the lens of the interactive installation Liquid Views: Narcissus Virtual Mirror (henceforth Liquid Views), created by Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss in 1992. The installation explores the transformative encounter between the self and the other, employing the first high-resolution multi-touch interface, realized as a generative, performative, audiovisual experience. Conventional notions of the self are challenged to reflect on identity, connectivity and the interplay between the tangible and the virtual. In the early 1990s, Liquid Views demonstrated a new way of seeing as observer and observed by looking at ourselves while simultaneously becoming publicly visible to others. A more recent example of seeing the self in the other is Mirror (2022), a street art commentary on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict by Norwegian artist AFK. Like Liquid Views, it captures the essence of self-discovery in the other, recalling Carl Gustav Jung’s observation in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933). It raises the question of whether the narcissistic self-image of the past can be transformed into an aesthetic of the empathetic gaze. This could be an extended act of mirroring, corresponding to a world that is tele-present.

This article introduces a curated selection of artistic instrument-based practices centred around listening to geophonic and biophonic aspects of the natural soundscape. Featured artists, including Ariel Guzik (Nereida), Joyce Hinterding and David Haines (Earthstar), Pauline Oliveros (Echoes from the Moon), Nicolas Montgermont (Axis Mvndi) and Juan Duarte (Augury), employ instrumental approaches to engage with natural environments. The article delves into the role of technology in mediating environmental awareness, establishing connections with key concepts such as attunement, resonance and techno-embodiment. The exploration unfolds as a genealogy of art and science instrument-based practices unified by the overarching idea of utilizing technologies to expand human sensorium, primarily through sound. The practices examined advocate for ecocentrism, presenting it as a strategic approach to cultivating empathy towards natural environments by acknowledging nature as an independent entity. Through instrumental relations, these practices enable humans to attune to the profound, otherwise imperceptible voice of nature, resonating beyond the confines of human language.

Fathoming global warming-induced climate change involves vast systems and time frames that are disconcerting for the mind. Can we assimilate data representing planetary scales of matter and time frames that progress over generations, far beyond the limits of our experience and physical perception? Ancient ice provides a four-dimensional perspective into Earth’s climatological timeline. The Ice-Time project is a series of immersive media artworks created in response to the precarious state of Earth’s ecosystem, engaging interdisciplinary science-art research methodologies and collaborations and heuristic experience with polar ice in Greenland. The series formally explores cinema in and as hyperspace, realized in diverse, immersive moving image forms, including a multichannel video installation with spatial sound, 360° cinema, ultra-high-resolution hyper-cinema and virtual reality (VR) to create embodied experiences of ice’s changing time frames. This article focuses on two works, the immersive cinema mediascape Ice-Time and the VR environment TesserIce. In Ice-Time, the beholder experiences the time frame of a different form of matter as a somatic experience. Ice-Time conveys hyper-realistic views of ice at all scales of space, from the microscopic to the planetary, combined within a three-dimensional space of original sound recordings of ice. The spectator’s body placed in a conflation of real with virtual space fosters a radical solicitude between the space-time of the human and the geological. TesserIce composes a true four-dimensional mediascape in VR that allows participants to propel themselves through the hyper-dimensions of Earth’s polar ice. The work uniquely places participants within a four-dimensional architecture. In each of these artworks, the stark imagery of ice serves as a distinct access point into the overwhelming complexity of global warming, creating an embodied, participatory and poetic experience of climate change’s time, scale, causes and effects, imbuing the spectator with a deep awareness of the environmental and the cultural implications of ice.

In this article we report on the work being carried out in the archival and presentation in mixed reality (MR) of materials pertaining to interactive artworks, in the context of a state-funded partnership project. We describe our approach in scanning and organizing materials as a contribution to an existing online archive of digital art (ADA); and in the design and implementation of an MR application for interacting with archive contents. Digital archives offer expanded possibilities for experiencing the content, which can be tailored to different use-cases and types of content. As frameworks for MR become more common and accessible to a wider audience, an archive can more readily combine characteristics of both the physical and digital worlds to empower the activities of visitors and scholars alike. For this, it is necessary to experiment with newer forms of presentation and interaction, as well as types of content, such as three-dimensional (3D) models. We offer details and insights about the processes used and decisions taken in both the archival and experimental aspects of our contribution and conclude with directions for further work.

In recent years, a myriad of three-dimensional (3D) digital doubles of our cultural heritage have grown up around us. For dissemination and communication purposes, and for the creation of pedagogical tools, study, reconstruction, or preservation, various institutions – through specific projects or associated companies – have turned to virtualizing their collections. The digital world has been filled with models that, although technically advanced, in many cases fail to activate the cultural heritage on which they are based, thus increasing the number of abandoned digital objects. Given this context, it is relevant to research creative projects that approach 3D digitization in a critical and creative way. This article will review three of them: ‘Material Speculation: ISIS’ (2015–16), ‘Antes del Olvido’ (2019) and ‘Arts Santa Mònica Official Tour’ (2021). Through their studies, we will observe the renewal of the debate about what should be preserved, the divergent and creative tactics to do so and the social implications of these processes. Finally, these cases are useful to approach heritage’s duration. The techniques call it into question and make us face our choices. What do we make last and what we discard? If it was born to remain, why is it made ephemeral by circumstances? Or, on the contrary, why do fleeting works persist in the heart of digital culture?

The development of remote sensing technologies, such as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and photogrammetry, accompanied by the exponential growth of easy-to-use 3D scanning applications and associated post-processing software, have made point cloud datasets accessible to a widening range of artists, designers and creative technologists. Does this growing interest and increased accessibility indicate the emergence of a new digital art medium? This article offers an analysis of artworks that help define this point cloud aesthetic as a distinctive visual language while contextually situating these contemporary artworks. After a brief introduction to key technologies in scientific and technical terms, we outline the medium’s natural progression, from its use as a recording medium to an expressive one. We briefly address the visual similarity that point cloud-derived imagery has to pointillism, noting the shared reliance upon the science of optics to inform both techniques. An aesthetic analysis of selected artworks follows, focusing upon four key elements proposed to distinguish the artwork’s visual language: (1) subject matter (i.e. derived from a scanned 3D object or environment of the real world), (2) transparency (i.e. the dissolution of objects and environments into data structures), (3) ambiguity (i.e. technical artefacts, ‘glitches’ or ‘mistakes’ generated by the scanning process itself) and finally (4) algorithmic shaping (i.e. data manipulated into expressive or representational forms as moving image, generative visualization, virtual reality [VR]). Through an artist-led exploration of both the technical process and visual systems generated by scanning technologies, this article argues that by using a specific aesthetic, point cloud artworks challenge our way of ‘looking at’ artworks that use scanning technologies and in the process, indicate a new direction for this digital medium.

This article looks at how empathy and experience, existing within the virtual reality (VR) performance medium, facilitate learning. The article focuses on the importance of soft skills in education and highlights empathy and experience as important contributors to developing skills in understanding and communicating with others. It acknowledges that the development of skills and attributes that benefit education and employment also benefit life satisfaction and well-being. The article contemplates VR as an ‘empathy machine’ and explores how VR performances offer immersive and interactive storytelling experiences. It argues that VR could promote empathy by broadening perspectives through exposure to immersive storytelling, in addition to real-world interactions, helping to advance beneficial soft skills development. If VR could be an effective ‘empathy machine’, then VR performances could offer an even more powerful medium to develop soft skills and empathy. The article draws on three different examples of VR performances to illustrate their education potency and concludes that, with further research, VR performances could be influential tools in education for soft skill development.