Visual Art

Brave New Landscape

A Manipulated, Synthesized Existence

by Emily Hall

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I DON'T KNOW about you, but I think I would feel claustrophobic inside Biosphere 2. Just knowing that my movements were restricted, that there was someplace (outside the hermetically sealed door) that I wasn't allowed to go... I'd feel caged, closed in, no matter how sumptuous the simulated landscape. I'm sure this tells you all sorts of things about my general discomfort on this earth, but that's not relevant at the moment; I was thinking about it, however, when I recently visited the multimedia installation Terraform 1 in the Henry's Media Gallery.

The project is the result of a collaboration between a team of artists and computer programmers and the UW Center for Advanced Research Technology in the Arts and Humanities (CARTAH). Here's what it is: a landscape of undulating white walls set at right angles to each other, some offering passage through the grid and some offering dead ends. That's the whole of the built environment, and it fills the room; the rest is digital light and sound, created and controlled by computer. Multiple video projectors send images, both moving and still, onto the walls and the grid; 12 audio channels provide a continuous soundscape. (As a nice touch, the computer-generated projection of the maze structure moving into the distance, cast onto the short walls of the gallery, looks a whole lot like something designed by Frank Gehry, whose studio show is in the next room.)

It's clear that the intent was to provide a new kind of landscape, one that began life in the binary brain of a computer and evolved to meet the expectations of imagination. Even the work's title speaks to this--Earth given form, but newly imagined, unexplored. Entering the installation does have some affinities with exploring new territory: Your eyes adjust slowly to the warping and morphing and synthesizing of the shapes in the video; you have to figure out where you can and can't go. I spent a good 45 minutes in the gallery, just searching for words to describe what was happening--the washes of color, shimmering and pixelating, a clattering sound like a manhole cover circling and falling.

In the most idealistic terms, Terraform 1 is an experiential installation, a new gallery paradigm, an interdisciplinary exploration of virtual space. But it's actually slightly less lofty, the usual result of an idea's Platonic winged beauty landing on mud-and-bone earth with a thud. Terraform 1 provides a good deal of visual pleasure--the sinking and billowing of the maze forms (which were designed, via computer, by sculptor Michael O'Malley), the play of light in an enclosed space, the intuitive progression of the audio track--but it doesn't add up to the experience that one suspects it should. It feels thin, not quite palpable, not quite enough. The space doesn't feel virtual; it feels quite actual. There are precedents in visual art for this kind of environment, most notably and obviously in the work of Nam June Paik, who pioneered many of the techniques of image manipulation that are used here (at least visually, if not in actual process). But Paik's work never failed to make reference to the equipment of visual perception (the video projector, the television, the laser), so that you're always aware of the degree to which you've moved from the expected experience. Here, things move at an unfamiliar pace, with a determinism you can't fathom, and this is the invisible computer's hand behind--and a deep remove from--the work.

However, if you are inclined in the direction of philosophical inquiry, Terraform 1 offers a couple of good questions to chew on. Like, what hold can art have on the computer-generated landscape? What kind of world has been created here? It's not the so-called real world, but it does refer to it. In the video images, you occasionally perceive what might be a recognized form, manipulated and synthesized into something else entirely. It's a reality mediated from outside, a computer's approximation--with its limited (ultimately) capacity to process the human aspect of experience--of nature, like a clone, perhaps, more sci-fi than biological.

It's an environment complete unto itself (which is what led me to think of Biosphere 2), but it doesn't sustain itself on the terms it sets out. Maybe I didn't spend enough time in it to feel the computer's choices evolve into a whole experience. But I will say this: I waited for a panicky claustrophobic feeling that never came.