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SPACE ODYSSEYS: sensation & immersion

Introduction

At the forefront of cultural production, VR and immersive technologies have attracted a whole new generation of scholars, both in Australia and internationally. More than shifting a few disputed borders, the Information Age is mapping entirely untested terrain. It also has its share of artists, who usually play fast and loose with the available technology. This is what artists always do. The great Renaissance painters used mathematics unofficially. Georges Seurat played unofficially with optical theory. Andy Warhol used acrylic and silk-screen unofficially. Artists are born experimenters and they play unofficially with the official programmes of technoculture.

This exhibition invites audiences to explore diverse notions of space -- architectural, temporal, emotional, visceral, imagined -- transformed by the technology into visions of light. Unusually, it reveals how the medium of least dimension might open up alternate interior spaces, as well as the possibility that the speed of digital media could stimulate the pleasure of slowness.

Imagination may be the original interactive multimedia, but the powerful metaphor of the journey is destined to grow ever more vertiginous as the silicon revolution heats up. Notions of 'here' and 'there' have blurred as sensations these days. We have become scuba-divers into a virtual world as we spend more and more time immersed in the Internet, on phone-lines and in the world of TV and cinema.

How virtual is our being already? We construct virtual maps and models, and sample things from the media of our senses and construct a world that is, at the same time, our experience of the world. The exhibition Space Odysseys delivers the experience at the crossroads between the new, immersive and virtual technologies and the human senses.

Notions of immersion and weightlessness, as experienced in the trance-like space scenes in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, provided the jumping off point for the exhibition's curator, Victoria Lynn. The self-contained vehicle in the movie becomes a conduit for travel, and manages to be both architecture and journey. This then becomes the insignia for the glowing, total-environment chambers created by Bruce Nauman, Mariko Mori, Luc Courchesne and others.

The title also replays the mythic dimensions of journey, where every person confronts the many thresholds which make up life, as in Homer's Odyssey and the stories of Orpheus in the underworld. Every voyage is a journey of transformation; relocation always leads to redefinition. As argonauts of the future, or shipwrecked sailors of the past, we move from actual space to imaginary space, from inwardness to outwardness, from intimacy to immensity.

George Alexander
Co-ordinator of Contemporary Art Programmes, Art Gallery of New South Wales

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