| "Fools Paradise" is a
VR installation and performance based on texts by visionary poet
and artist William Blake. In the sketches, the brief texts are associated
with human figures embedded in an island landscape that is at once
a vast book, a sculpture garden, and a network of pathways through
language and music. Icoshedral gems and 48 masks replaced the figures
in the final production. Participants in the installation wander
over the landscape, triggering multi-modal events. In performance,
musicians and a VR performer explore the work in depth, to reveal
hidden structures, symbols, and narratives.
As a composition, "Fools Paradise" is grounded in abstract notational
structures that help to determine its visual architecture, musical
material, and event-flow. In other words, it is an intermedia artwork,
where events in one sensory modality may be mapped onto events in
another modality. At the same time, different media are left free
to display their own unique qualities, without strict mapping. The
degree of mapping at any given point is part of the compositional
process.
This approach to composition is peculiarly
apt for digital technology. Thanks to digital technology, compositional
structures can operate at all levels of granularity and with a degree
of abstraction that places all media on the same plane, and performances
can attain an unprecedented degree of precision and synchronicity
of events.
Though we embrace technology to realize our
art, we are acutely aware of the twin necessities of approaching
technology from a critical point of view and of engaging culture
as a historically rooted enterprise. The selection of texts from
Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" presents a critique
of the tyranny of religious institutions and a plea for personal
freedom of belief that resonates today. The use of VR as a performance
medium rather than as a passively explored architecture, the blending
of live acoustic music with electronics, and the use of "hand-painted"
texture maps in the VR landscape all are meant to point to the continuity
of human presence at the core of culture. As artists, first of all
we create experiences--not precious objects or cultural values.
We honor Blake as a multimedia artist avant la lettre, an
artist who melds poetic language with printed and painted image
in his books. We place ourselves within tradition that we may challenge
our present moment as he challenged his own historical moment. |
