Char Davies — Osmose

1995

Artists: Char Davies · Year: 1995 · Medium: Immersive virtual-reality artwork; head-mounted display with breath and balance sensors · Substrate: SGI Onyx workstation; Softimage 3D rendering; custom breathing/vest interface hardware · Place: Montréal, Canada · Institution: Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (premiere); Softimage (production support) Char Davies's Osmose, premiered in 1995 at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, is an immersive virtual-reality artwork in which the viewer — wearing a head-mounted display and a vest that sensed breathing and balance — moved through a series of poetic, atmospheric virtual environments by breathing and leaning rather than by using handheld controllers. Breathe in to rise; breathe out to descend; lean to move horizontally. The environment responded to breath. Participants reported a strong sense of emotional and bodily immersion, markedly different from the gaming-derived VR conventions that would dominate subsequent decades. Osmose was unusually lush for a 1995 VR piece. The virtual environment included twelve scenes — forest, pond, abyss, cloud, earth — rendered in semi-transparent particles and soft organic forms rather than the polygonal-grid aesthetic typical of contemporaneous computer graphics. Davies had come to VR from a painting practice, and the painterly sensibility was visible throughout. What Osmose argued — at a moment when VR was generally framed as a gaming technology — was that virtual reality could be a contemplative medium, and that the body's interface with the virtual was an artistic choice with specific emotional consequences. The breath-based navigation system remains one of the most cited alternatives to controller-based VR. Davies is still working. She founded Immersence, an artist-run research institute in Quebec, and continues to produce immersive work. Osmose has been exhibited at the Smithsonian, the Barbican, and SFMOMA. Lore Davies developed Osmose over four years with a small team of programmers and audio engineers. The piece was funded partly by Softimage, the Montreal computer-graphics company that had made its name with the 3D animation software used on Jurassic Park (1993). Davies was on Softimage's board at the time; the company contributed substantial computing resources. The ambisonic audio was composed by Rick Bidlack. A sequel, Ephémère (1998), extended the breath-based interface to seasonal environments. Sources • Davies, Char — Immersence Inc. archive at immersence.com • Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal — Osmose documentation • Grau, Oliver — Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (MIT Press, 2003)