Ephémère — Char Davies's VR follow-up to Osmose

1998

Artists: Char Davies · Year: 1998 · Medium: Immersive VR artwork — seasonal nature-environment navigated by breath · Substrate: SGI Onyx workstation; breath-based navigation interface (extending Osmose's approach); seasonal environment with decay and regeneration · Place: Montreal, Canada · Institution: Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (premiere) Char Davies's Éphémère (1998) is the direct sequel to Osmose (1995) and the second of the two major works that define her immersive-VR practice. Where Osmose had established the breath-controlled navigation method that distinguishes Davies's work from every commercial VR system — you rise in the virtual space by inhaling, you descend by exhaling, you move by leaning — Éphémère extended the vocabulary downward, underground, into a layered vertical landscape built around three strata (forest, earth, body) that the participant could move between by shifting attention as much as by shifting physical posture. The breath-control was built on a pressure sensor strapped across the participant's chest; the body-lean was a motion-capture vest. No joystick. No controller. The experience lasted twelve to fifteen minutes per participant, during which they floated through Davies's painterly particle-rendered landscape of phosphor-green forest canopy, giving way downward to root systems, giving way further down to fluidic organ-like forms that Davies described as "the interior of the body." The piece ended with the participant having moved through the three strata and returning, literally, to the forest. The visual language was not photoreal; it was Romantic-painterly, soft-edged, with everything in Éphémère drawn in layered transparencies that evoked nineteenth-century plein-air paintings more than any video game. Davies had been an oil painter before she was an immersive-media artist — her 1980s Quebec paintings hang in several Canadian museum collections — and both Osmose and Éphémère are, explicitly, paintings that had been coaxed into moving. The argument is that VR can operate in a register the commercial industry has refused: slow, contemplative, bodily-intimate, non-gamified, non-task-oriented. Davies's work is the clearest sustained case against the argument that VR must be either a game or a tool. Éphémère has been exhibited in major institutional settings — National Gallery of Canada, Museum of Modern Art's VR Week, Vancouver Art Gallery — and remains available for installation through Davies's Immersence company. She is seventy-one and still producing. Lore Davies lives on a farm outside Montreal and has since the 1990s, a fact she has said is not incidental: Éphémère is full of landscape she has walked. She built the first Osmose and Éphémère installations with a small team in her studio — the software was programmed by her collaborator John Harrison in C++ on Silicon Graphics Reality Engine hardware, and the vest and breath sensor were assembled by hand. Each exhibition requires significant technical support; Davies specifies the environment precisely (soundproofing, controlled lighting, a single viewer at a time in a dark room, an external audience watching the participant's silhouette against the screen), and she has historically refused invitations where the institution could not meet the specifications. The one-viewer-at-a-time staging means that during a gallery show, perhaps thirty participants per day experience the work; over a three-month run, maybe 2,500 people total. Davies has said this is part of the point — the work is not for scale but for depth. Sources • Davies, Char — "Osmose: Notes on Being in Immersive Virtual Space" (Digital Creativity, 1998). • Grau, Oliver — Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (MIT, 2003). • Immersence Inc. — immersence.com (artist archive).