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Agnes Heged¸s, Bernd Lintermann, Jeffrey Shaw ConFIGURING the CAVE [1997] is an computer based interactive video installation that undertakes a set of technical and pictorial strategies to identify various paradigmatic conjunctions of body and space where the human figure is used as a psycho-geographical locus for multiform spatial representations. It is one of the first art works to be created using the CAVE™ a unique form of virtual reality environment, where high resolution real time computer generated stereoscopic images are projected onto the three walls and floor of a specially constructed room, creating a totally immersive virtual reality experience for the viewers. The user interface in this interactive installation is a near life-size wooden puppet that has the same appearance as the stereotype artist's wooden mannequin. Fitted with electronic measurement devices that are embedded within each of it moveable joints, it can be manipulated by the viewers to control the transformations of both the computer generated imagery and the sound environment. In ReConFIGURING the CAVE [2001] being shown in the FUTURE CINEMA exhibition, there are just two larger projections surfaces, one on the floor and the second adjoining it standing upright. The physical wooden puppet has been replaced by a LCD touch screen where the viewers can manipulate a virtual representation of that puppet in almost the same way as the original figure. The work is constituted by seven differentiated audiovisual domains Together they offer a consonant exploration of the manifold relationships between body, space and language. The imagery has been created using a unique set of algorithmic software tools that is able to generate an emergent complexity of mutable forms and organic abstractions, which are conjoined with representative and symbolic images. Movement of the puppets body and limbs dynamically effect changing parameters in the real time image generating software, and particular postures of the puppet cause specific visual events to occur. Most significantly it is the action of moving the puppet's hands to cover and then uncover it's eyes, which causes the transition from one pictorial domain to the next. The composer Les Stuck has created seven sound compositions for the seven pictorial domains in this work, which is presented via an eight channel spatialized sound system that augments the three-dimensional qualities of the stereoscopic visual environment. The sound compositions, like the imagery, are interactively affected by the viewer's handling of the interface puppet's body and limbs, and thus contributes to a synchronous unity of both visual and audio transformations in this work and to its overall synaesthetic singularity. The software architecture underlying this work Xfrog - was developed in its entirety by Bernd Lintermann and uses sets of interrelated algorithmic procedures to create a complex dynamic of movement and image transformations that can be modulated by the user interface.
ConFIGURING the CAVE envisions a mediated environment of functional relationships between bodily and spatial coordinates. These relationships are both physical and conceptual, creating an anthropomorphic world that refers to the long history in all cultures of conjecturing the body as the locus and measure of the universe. At the same time this work is located in a post-modern exigency which has dislocated the body in a vertiginous space of deconstructed coordinates and equivocal complexity. The long sought after harmony between macrocosm and microcosm is brought into question in the fragile covariance of the representative surrogate body - the puppet that is now vicariously positioned in a measureless space of reticular forms. Yet there is a new balance this work seeks to formulate through a meta-discourse of images that are able to construe a space of meaning that is an interactive extension and coherent sanction of our contemporary human condition, both separated from and connected to historical configurations.
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