Catherine Richards
(Canada)
"THE VIRTUAL BODY"
versión en español
The Virtual Body is a study in propriaception and interactivity which combines virtual reality in the setting of a lavishly decorated Rococo room.
In the room is a booth which reminds us of the stereoscopic columns from the middle of the 19th century, when new optical instruments were in part a medium for perception. Virtual Bodies occupy this ambiguous space between the instrument and the object. The virtual room represented in the booth is a miniaturized version of the real room. In one of the walls of the booth, where you would normally find the controls for the instrument, there is a hole where the hand can enter into the virtual room. With the entry of the hand, the crystal walls of the tiny virtual room become suddenly opaque and lose the transparency and the sharpness of the one that is outside. Meanwhile, the spectator watches as her hand elongates towards the floor of the room, the monitor. The image of the floor in the monitor starts to recede. In a moment, the spectator starts to experience a corporal illusion: the displacement of the body, a simulation of movement. The hand appears to move infinitely away from the body. Then the hand begins to take the body with it. It's as if the miniaturized space is unfolding into infinite space and the stillness is unfolding into movement. The body loses all reference points: interior/exterior, gigantic/tiny, spectator/object, part/whole. The spectator, captured by the dispersion of the events, becomes the instrumental space of technology.
Equipment used: personal computer, optical sensors, liquid crystal displays, brass, wood and other materials.
Catherine Richards is a visual artist that works with new technologies. Her work in the area of art, culture and new technologies covers 15 years during which she has deliberately transgressed many boundaries in the practice of art, theorectical projects and research. In 1993 she received the Media Arts Award from the Canada Council for the Arts, given out every two years. In 1993-94 she received a research grant in contemporary Canadian art from the Visual Art Centre of the National Museum of Canada.
