Introduction

          This project began as an inquiry into the virtual. As a college writing instructor, I was awarded a course release in the Spring 2016 semester so that I might use the time to redesign my class so that it would better reflect our program's Student Learning Outcomes.  My proposal is available under the page, Course Redesign Award.  In the document, I propose that I would study my own teaching methods by doing my own homework with the class.  The idea was to place myself closer to the vantage point of the students so that I could have a deeper understanding of the way my writing assignments work. Thus the website you are now reading was somewhat stereoscopic from the beginning, in that it combines two perspectives into a more "3-dimensional" product.  Here, I am writing from the perspectives of both student and teacher; and my audience is both students and teachers. This portfolio is to be used to help provide a concrete example of a final portfolio so that students who need guidance might benefit in their own work. I also hope that it will add to the conversation our writing program has been having about portfolios in our curriculum.  

          In order to underscore this double-vision and to explore the manner in which media affects and functions as content, I chose to work with Google Cardboard, an open source and free virtual reality panoramic stereoscopic camera application. The Cardboard viewer can be purchased for less than $15.00 on Amazon and is widely available via other sources.  Visitors who have access to this device should download the Cardboard images onto their phones and then view them using the Cardboard application.  Visitors who don't have the viewer can view the files in panoramic two-dimensional format in the Virtual Reality Gallery.  

          My plan from the beginning was to create a 3-D virtual gallery for my artwork using the Cardboard camera. I had originally intended to find a gallery for my artwork in nature. The plan was to take Cardboard images of the place and then, using Photoshop, augment the virtual image by inserting my 2-D paintings into the stereoscopic files.  After some experimentation, it became obvious that this was not only difficult to manage without a proper application to edit vr.jpg images, but that it didn't really make sense.  Why not just put the images into the gallery and then record the image?  Paintings are 2-D artforms afterall.  What is gained by cutting and pasting them over top of a 3-D sterescopic image?

          Once I decided to physically hang the pictures in the scene, my focus began to shift away from the task of editing Cardboard images and toward the concept of VR as a means of archiving the ephemeral.  I have worked as an installation artist before, and one of the most heart-rending realities most installation artists must contend with is the fact that their art will likely come down: it will be dismantled and then either stored away a collection of artifacts or simply thrown into the garbage.  Now that I have done this project, I have started to see how advances in image making are moving us toward a time when scenes--events--will be archivable in a much more digital sense.  I can use the Cardboard images to inhabit the exhibition I created, even now that it has been taken down. The new technology of seeing turned a 1-day exhbition of light and nature and sumi ink paintings into a set of files that can be disseminated electronically.  I have already shared this exhibition with people who live far away and I am able to return to this place and re-experience it even now that it no longer exists as it has. 

          I hope visitors can enjoy the exhibition in its flat online form as well as in the form of a three-dimensional virtual environment. I have included a Cardboard Gallery, a gallery of Stills from the install, as well as "Lapse", the short story I wrote as an extra credit Creative Challenge in my class; in it, I discovered the form that my exhibition would take, envisioning the corner of our backyard strung with lines hung with paintings the way people hang their clothes out to dry.  The "Epilogue" serves as a restrospective reflective essay concerning the final project as a whole, and the "Letter to the Reader" addresses my students who are required to write a similar piece as well as my colleagues who are required to make visible the manner in which their classes support our Student Learning Outcomes in their annual activity reports. These segments are all viewable from the menu at the top of each page.  I have also included a "Process" documentary button which provides links to various artifacts and writings concerning the creative process as I experienced it as a teacher doing her own assignments this semester.  
           To put it in terms of Walter Benjamin's aura, which is all that surrounds a work of art as it exists in space and time, as described in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reporoduction (or Its Mechanical Reproducibility)"--instead of dislodging the works of art from their space in time through further remediation via digital authoring tools and special effects, I chose to use the Cardboard technology to record and preserve that aura. In the process, I learned that the term "virtual" really is nothing new.  The word simply means "an approximation of reality."  Artists and writers and film makers and so many others have been working in the virtual for centuries. It is only with the Cardboard viewer that I was able to see this, and I hope others can see this as well.  

          Thank you for your time and enjoy!