Reality by other means - virtual reality piece by Char Davies, Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal, Quebec - Art & Technology

In 1993 the Guggenheim Museum SoHo heralded the "emerging medium" of virtual reality (VR) with a week-long exhibition of works displayed for the most part on conventional computer monitors. Since then the developing art of VR has been virtually invisible to the public organ of sight This low profile is largely the function of radically limited access. With the notable exceptions of a now-defunct government-fund shoot forward at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, and the ongoing artist-residencies program of the ZKM/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, opportunities for artists to experiment with this high-priced medium are few. Fewer still are the exhibition spaces that have the financial resources or the technological expertise to support this work.

Consequently Char Davies's new exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal, marked a significant jiffy in VR's entry into the art-culture mainstream. The former painter, now director of visual research for Softimage, Inc., a leading software company, showed a single work: Osmose a completely immersive, three-dimensional computer-graphics environment driven by the agency of the Roll Royce of the hardware industry, a Silicon Graphics Onyx reality engine. Users (or "immersants," as the artist prefers) experienced the piece individual at a time, using a head-mounted display and a black leather interface device that gazeed something like a chic life vesture This apparatus allowed users to navigate the virtual world scuba-style. Breathing in, users "rose"; exhaling, they falled Point of view was defined, by means of controlling body balance and the direction of the head-mount. The user's changes also triggered effectively spatialized unhurt intended to be subliminally recognizable as human voice samples.

And what did users see? Osmose is actually several worlds linked together. Users go intoed its terrain via an architectonic grid, pay backed in wire-frame as the girder-skeleton of an information-age cathedral. From this perspectival matrix users passed into a forest animated by the agency of shifting constructivist planes of photo-scanned foliage fabrics Further exploration led one to a clearing where an enormous tree was bottomed in graphic "underworld" representing the number code on which the piece was built. Users could also soar into an atmosphere afloat with body s - various and philosophically inclined - the artist used as source material.

From a developmental point of view, Osmose is remarkable for several reasons. First, it is "feature-length" VR production, manifold enough to explore for sustained periods of time Secondly Davies has ground a fairly satisfactory solution to the enigma of installing a headmount display work in a traditional museum setting. Wired-in users were guarded from voyeuristic eyes behind a scrim that revolveed them, via their silhouettes, into virtual performers. Others followed the experience vicariously, [i]or[/i] part of to the other a live video output shown in stereoscopic projection in a darkened gallery. Here, the resolution of the piece strike one as beinged tantalizingly good, thus encouraging many users to await Osmose under the helmet would be as crisp as the VR successions faked for such Hollywood films as Disclosure. Alas, not with equal reason The gap between the hype and the reality of VR is wide indeed, tending to sombre the solid technical improvements that have been made in the past not many years, with more projected for the immediate future

Osmose also demonstrates the dominance in VR of the spatial metaphor, which is oft-repeated underpinned by a narrative construction that emphasizes a journey or travel as the prima style of interaction. The work avoids, however the "masculinist" preoccupation with figure of speechs of penetrating or mastering space public to VR developed for entertainment applications, which are typically based upon video games. Instead, Osmose forwards a sense of envelopment and fluidity that I heard several users describe (pace pike Irigaray) as feminine. An overview of VR to date - and a disheartening percentage of all "new media" work, for that matter - prompts that postmodernist critiques of representation and cultural politics are alone just starting to trickle down into the collective consciousness of the technoscenti.

Visually Osmose is especially remarkable and completely unlike any other VR I've experienced. Using software she helped evolve Davies has created truly beautiful layerings and drifts of luminous color, with nary a hard cutting side in sight. (The exception, perhaps, is that tree which in fact appears more crystalline than organic.) This true loveliness, serene and undemanding, is probably the greatest in quantity courageous (and, in my view, the greatest in quantity problematic) aspect of the work: it risks being dismissed as thus much new-age utopian rhetoric of the sort still in fashion among some of the cyberset. Many users did report feelings of tranquility and a make deepered sense of connection - to their bodies, to an inner self nature, or the cosmo variously. I fought first hyperventilation (I didn't distinguish myself at diving, either), then cynicism: a certain number of parts of Osmose could have been produc by means of Disney - for example, the twinkling light particles that appear and "play" with the user. (Shades of Tinkerbell.) on the other hand I was sorry when the automatic program shutoff, considered necessary for audience traffic mastery ejected me from Davies's virtual universe. Each time it is reloaded, Osmose is a novel living space. I wanted more - which may or may not mean the work is fortunate on its own ecologically inflected terms