Process

          I went through several ups and downs in my research into the virtual this semester.  On the philosophical side, I really enjoyed looking into the concept of virtual reality.  It is the ultimate realization of Descarte’s mind-body problem, bypassing as it does, the million-year-old connection between our eyes and our brains and forces its users to ask some interesting questeions. As I traversed this subject, I encountered many new texts and got to revisit many I had worked with in the past—Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard.  I watched The Matrix trilogy and Videodrome, Tron (the original one) and Waking Life.  I also read several blogs and web pages that dealt with the subject of VR and offered tutorials in how to make and edit it. 

          My original plan had been to create a VR gallery for my art work.  I wanted to place my paintings in a beautiful setting and enable people to move around and explore them—the way that Google Cardboard allows you to wander through the Palais Versailles and examine the paintings there. For much of January and February, I experimented with creating my own VR files and figured out how I could edit the images.  I found PANO’s to be more versatile than .jpg.vr’s.  They don’t have the stereoscopic function or the sound files that Carboard includes so I was able to edit them easily.  The Cardboard files were a different story.  It was around the time in my process that I started running Photoshop filters on the stereoscopic images that I realized that there were truly physical side effects to working with VR, especially in experimental ways.  I was in over my head.  I decided that instead of ruining my eyesight, I would rethink the idea of the virtual and then bring that back to my project.

          All the while that this inquiry was going on, it was late winter, and the arc of the sun placed a lovely fall of light right over my workspace in my studio. I would come down there around 10 in the morning to find the entire studio glowing with light.  It was the kind of light that artists dream about—imbuing all that it touched with a layer of magic. I painted regularly through late winter—refining an old technique I had developed in response to the hyper viscous qualities of sumi ink many years ago. The first piece was, in my opinion, my best so far.  It was done in true sumi style—all as one motion. In traditional sumi painting, the practice is considered a form of meditation—one gesture: one image.  The practice goes back millenia and has been tied to the art of sword play:

          I would begin by painting with water and then using an eye dropper to release pigment onto the surface and to search out a form.  A lot of times, I didn’t know what I was thinking or feeling until the painting was done.  I made over forty of these sorts of paintings and lovingly called them my Procrastination series.  The light in the studio outlasted the cold but at the time that I am writing this, the studio is shadowed by spring foliage, now only getting afternoon sun for less than an hour each day. I have moved my workspace out of doors since then and set up on our porch where the light is even better on pretty days.    

          This semester has been a particularly trying time for me and my family.  We have been taken to extremes of sorrow as we have faced births and cancer diagnoses.  These events have colored all that I have done this semester. 

         For the final project, I drew on imaginative work done to comlete my Creative Challenge extra credit assignment. You can find this assignment and the first draft under the Process tab at the top of this page. At the time that I was working on the story, I was also finishing up a book chapter on "combinatory learning" and writing in engineering.  I was working on a chapter for publication in a book called Creative Ways of Knowing in Engineering, to be coming out in the next year.  This chapter was about these sorts of exercises--the rule-based writing challenges.  In it, I explained how it had emerged from a studio drawing class I took when I was a grad student.  

        Although I had done the Creative Challenge before, I had never done the Robot assignment.  In the story, I explore the age old creator-creation story that we see in narratives like Genesis and Pinochio in so far as it could be pressed in the context of digital vision--virtual reality--and artificial intelligence. The question that drove the story was, "Can a robot tell the difference between the real world and the digital world?" Upon completing the assignment, I had no answer--but wondered, "Can a human?" 

         The story not only allowed me a chance to stretch out some of my thoughts that had been building as a result of all the inquiry journals I had to write for the class.  It also gave me a space to invision a virtual space.  In the story, I describe a virtual reality exhibition of art that is comprised of paintings strung up on clotheslines.  Once I got the idea of how I might hang an exhibition for a virtual reality recording, I started to find ways and means of making it happen.  By using a natural environment to offset the artworks--one that I might be able to film using the Carboard camera and then offer via this website as a viewable space for other Cardboard users--the process of assembling the exhibition became pretty easy: I simply used what was at hand. 

          I didn't have to climb any trees. I used a footstool to string the line up a little higher than head-level and I did my best not to upset a mother robin who had obviously set up a nest close by. Until she jumped out at me chirping aggressively, I had not considered how all the line strung up in the trees could complicate a bird's world--makes you think.

         When I was done stringing the line, I fastened the images to it.  For the first draft of the exhibition--the one available to view in the Carboard Gallery--I included all the paintings I did this semester as well as the glass head that had served as my inspiration for the character of Hettie in "Lapse".  In retrospect, the use of a glass head to represent silicon-based lifeforms seems like a good choice. I chose the location of the vantage point for my Cardboard images carefully, hoping to capture all the images in one sweep.   When I was done, I placed a mat in the center of the exhbition and spent some time looking at the way the paintings appeared amidst the natural surroundings.  I shot a few Cardboard images from this seated vantage point, waiting a for the sun to move, and shot the exhibition a few more times, sometimes sitting, sometimes standing with various cameras and in several formats.  

           Before weather could ruin the paintings, I disassembled the exhibition and brought it inside. A few days later, I restrung the entire thing using cotton line and wooden clothespins instead of the nylon and plastic paperclips I'd used or the first draft.  This assemblage was only photographed with my DSLR.  I did not take Cardboard images of this one and I only included my very favorite paintings here.  I realized with line strung up the way it was, I had several planes to work between for viewing the paintings.  I played around with how lines in the foreground of the digital images I took could interact with lines in the background. It was a neat effect. Perhaps next time, I could print out the images and string those up...or I could cut and paste them into a Cardboard file....

         In between the two drafts of the exhibition, I produced this website which is designed to meet the Specifications and Requirements laid out in the tab under the Process bar in the menu.   

         While building the website, I decided to arrange the tabs somewhat strangely, placing the Exhibition tab first, where a Home page link might be expected. I decided to use the Exhibition tab to create just a title page for the exhibition as a whole.  I realized too late in the semester that some of the Specifications and Requirements were a bit redundant and that they might well be revised for next semester. The galleries of stills and Cardboard images, along with the page that features the short story "Lapse" are all parts of the Exhibition, as well as the Process documentary section, the Introduction, the Epilogue and the Letter to the Reader, which ties the project to the University Writing Programs' Student Learning Outcomes. All of these parts and some supplementary materials can be accessed by the toolbar at the top of each page.

          The deadline for this project is tomorrow, and while I had made a point to get a decent version of my portfolio up before the weekend so my students could use it as a reference, I find myself just like many of them are right now, down to the night before, proofreading--and finding mistakes.

          The final thing I will do when I have proofed everything over and made sure that all my pages show and that they look okay from another person's computer, is to cut and paste all of the content here into a Word document version of the Specifications and Requirements Cover Sheet mentioned previously.  Then I will be done!