CaveWriting

Explained very simply, this piece is a story about a man being presented with a mysterious object that is either 1) directions upon which he must act or 2) documentation of his own origins. If they are the former, then the events that proceed in the story are the events that proceed. If they are the latter, the events that proceed are his re-encounter with how he came into being not as an organism (what is that even?), necessarily, but as a someone who believes in space, physicality, reason, etc.The piece alternates between two locations: "in here," which is where the narrator builds a space in order to orient himself in relation to the question the mysterious object presents, and "that sort of place," which is where the narrator is presented with new information that both helps and antagonizes him. The juxtaposition of the closed, structured space of "that sort of place" with the open sprawl of "in here" invokes the question that the narrator circles around - whether he can recreate or reconstruct his own beginnings or origins to the point of creating the closed, structured space in which he exists now.

Source: https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/wdm/Cave+Writing+Presentation…

There are many immersive e-lit works that require more than the affordances provided by a screen and a keyboard to experience. These get displayed rarely and even when they do get shown, they are often shown poorly, either due to a lack of facilities (CAVES are rare and expensive), lack of curation and context (a series of random technology demos does not an exhibition make), limited audience (4 at a time in a CAVE or one at a time with an HMD means that the number of people who can experience the piece is limited), rushed experience (when cramming 8 demos into a 4 hour slot with 5 pieces each most people spend more time waiting around in the dark while someone furiously clatters away at a command line trying to get the piece to launch than actually experiencing them). There are many works in this category (Rettberg/Coover’s recent works at EVL’s CAVE 2, years of output from Brown University’s CaveWriting program, various spin off projects from that which happened at University of Louisiana Lafayette/LITE 3D, some of the output of Manifest, AR members such as Patrick Lichty, Jeremy Hight, myself, etc.) I wish to show them at ELO in Bergen, as many of these works have been rarely seen in person at all, much less outside the USA, and they don’t translate well to traditional documentation techniques. (Holding a camera over someone’s shoulder while they wave their hands at blurry double images and then writing a paper that says “No really, it’s awesome in person. Trust me” seems to still be the state of the art.)