Virtual Reality installation at Interstitial Gallery in Seattle and at Currents New Mexico in 2018
Using HTC Vive and Unity an alternate reality is projected to viewers inspired by the autobiographical ‘Doors of Perception’ by Aldous Huxley.
I was brought in to a project that intended to be a virtual reality project inspired by the ‘Doors of Perception’ by Aldous Huxley. The project would be AR in the sense that the VR mask would ‘reveal’ a parallel or augmented world on top of what could be normally perceived in reality.
In some ways this show has its genesis in the collapse of Imaginary Machine, a festival too cool for this world. Seeking a new home for the project my two friends and collaborators Reilly Donovan and Brandon Aleson pitched the project to 4culture, an art grant foundation in Seattle.
We refined the idea and worked out the experience that would incorporate elements from The Doors of Perception into an experiential artwork.
The Experience
We created a Cornell box – a virtual test lab for rendering techniques. Outside one window we see a Southern California eucalyptus trees grove surrounding a psychedelic, undulating shape. In the room with you is an Ingres painting whose colors change as you move and a bookcase which, before you put on the VR goggles, seemed to be empty. As you look at the bookcase, the room fills with the sounds of a 15th century Italian choir. Turning to the table you see a flower. The longer you look at it the less defined its shape becomes and the louder becomes the electric hum emanating from the table…
The bag of tricks we built into this work is just insane. It was VR, using an HTC Vive headset. Inside the headset the gallery and furniture was recreated 1:1 and by using a leapmotion sensor mounted on the headset users could see their hands and interact with many parts of the virtual world. Several elements – the custom built bookshelf and table were connected to realworld transducers controlled by arduino in the furniture which were wired to play music when the person in the headset looked at their virtual counterparts. A television mounted to the wall allowed those waiting for the headset to see through the eyes of whoever was experiencing the piece. A curtain hung on the wall could be virtually manipulated and the virtual books could be picked up and thrown. The painting on the wall shifted color depending on how far away the person was. The virtual flower on the table responded to touch and would modulate depending on how long it was looked at.
As many tricks as we had in the experience, they were carefully crafted so that users could try them all within about 3-5 minutes and not miss much to prevent a line from forming.
On this project with Brandon and Reilly was so much fun. We all did so much to pull it off. For me this was one of the first times I consciously tried to project manage in addition to getting my hands dirty with tech art. I made sure we had copy out to press about the show, made sure all artists met regularly, kept our schedule, produced a team task checklist, planned out
One thing I’m very proud of is the ‘creative’ portion because I often get carried away with the technical execution – the schema and the algorithms. For Mind at Large I dug deep into the text of The Doors of Perception to find elements that we could bring to life and how to best show case the substantial technological know-how that the team posseses.
Through the window is a backyard much like the one that Aldous spent much of his mescaline trip sitting in. The painting on the wall is one specifically referenced in the text and references the shifting impressions of color. During his trip, Aldous becomes obsessed with flowing clothing and so we included an interactive curtain both real and virtual that could be synaesthetically touched. The music heard in the work is a madrigal composed by those mentioned in the text.
In order to nail the experience and build momentum for the project we showed a preview of the work at the Seattle VR meetup in November 2017. We learned a lot about what people liked and wanted to interact with!
