French artist Jackie Matisse, creator of kite-like art works, premiered a new art form when her kites flew in Virginia Tech's virtual-reality CAVEË™ last year. Now the exhibition is being expanded to include sound for future exhibitions in Europe.
Matisse, granddaughter of top 20th-century artist Henri Matisse and step-daughter of artist Marcel Duchamp, creates teflon or crepe kites, with artistic tails as long as 15 feet, that can soar through the air, ripple through water, or undulate with the air currents in a room. People were able to float along with the kites through the technology of the CAVE during a public workshop Jackie Matisse conducted at Virginia Tech, her first workshop in the United States. Students and the public helped Matisse create new kites while they waited to visit the CAVE. The artist, the students, and the public were part of a new artistic technology now being explored and researched at Virginia Tech.
Now Matisse is meeting with Dominique Geeraert, a CAVE facilitator in France, and with composer Tom Johnson to add sound to the visual presentation. Funding from Markel is helping with the project, and the group hopes to get additional funding to send Dave Pate, a virtual-reality expert from Chicago, to France to write the program for the next piece, which will be presented in France in August. Virginia Tech theatre-arts student Francis Thompson works with Matisse on the programs. It was his thesis work that resulted in Matisse's ground-breaking CAVE art at Virginia Tech.
Artist Ray Kass, director of the Virginia Tech Mountain Lake Workshops, called the CAVE presentation of Matisse's kites "a unique development in sculpture." Matisse, he said, uses "the languages of early modernism in a format everybody can like--kites." Her works are social sculptures that engage the public, Kass said. With the CAVE experience, Matisse added a new dimension of social interaction, as people actually felt they were flying along with the kites. Now they will have sound along with the visual experience.
Jackie Matisse's work has been shown throughout Europe and in the Far East, as well as in Paris and New York. Kites made to float underwater are made of material of the same specific gravity as water so they will float around underwater without sinking "like tendrils or seaweed," according to art critic Suzi Gablik. In virtual reality, Gablik said, the kites move around "in a sinuous way."
When visitors entered the CAVE, they were surrounded on four sides by three-dimensional projections of the art works. They could control their environment through a "wand" and specially designed goggles. "This technology, formerly thought only to be science fiction, allows a viewer to experience the flight of kites and the surrounding environment in different ways," said Daryn Warner, a student involved in the project.
The visitors could fly along with the kites, go through the kites, swim with the kites, and have the closest experience possible to actually being right with the kites as they soared, floated, twisted, and turned.
Ron Kriz, director of the Virginia Tech CAVE, compared the experience to becoming small and going through the CRT screen into the three-dimensional world there. The experience of the CAVE, he said, is "not just for science and engineering."
The virtual-reality production of Matisse's works was an international and interdisciplinary cooperative event involving Virginia Tech's School of the Arts and University Visualization and Animation Group; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Arlington; physicists at the University of Illinois; and SARA, the virtual-reality and supercomputer center in Amsterdam.
With Matisse as artistic director, arts administration student Francis Thompson served as project coordinator as part of his thesis work. He and other students visited Matisse in France and worked at SARA to prepare her works for the CAVE.
Tom Coffin of the Supercomputing Center in Arlington developed the program and scanned Matisse's works for use in the CAVE. Physicist Shalini Venkataraman and Jason Leigh at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana created the code to put the works into the illusionistic movement in the CAVE.
Matisse's CAVE piece was simultaneously exported electronically to project partners, including SARA and the University of Illinois's CAVE facility. The program had a second premier at SARA in September 2002. Sound will now add a whole new dimension to the virtual-reality art experience.
Photos available from Virginia Tech Photo (601460 shows Matisse in the cave with a kite). 540/231-7317 or [email protected]
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