VRML

Within an enclosed darkened room, the image of Beyond Manzanar's 3-dimensional space is projected onto a large, wall-sized screen. The life-sized image fills your field of view and gives you a feeling of immersion within the virtual space. A joystick mounted on a pedestal in the middle of the room allows you to move your viewpoint at will through the virtual space. Speakers mounted on either side of the screen provide stereo sound. Although only one person at a time can control movement in the space, others can watch and share the experience. We have combined techniques of computer games and theater design to create a highly symbolic, often surreal environment with a poetic reality stronger than photorealism. The mountain panorama that defines the Manzanar site forms a constant backdrop for shifting layers of superimposed context. Open doors lead viewers through spaces that react to their presence, shifting between home and prison, between paradise and wasteland, to investigate Manzanar as a layering of contradictory and complementary images and emotions for two groups of immigrants. Archival photographs of Manzanar Internment Camp alternate with paradise gardens constructed from ancient Japanese scrolls and Persian miniature paintings; images of the immigrant American Dream alternate with media images of betrayal and hatred. Sound is also an important mechanism to set the emotional and cultural context: The constant moan of the desert wind or the cool burbling of water from a fountain; the scream of war jets or a woman singing a love song. The virtual space is sensitive to your presence, shifting context around you to change your emotional relationship to the space. If you follow an open road, barbed wire appears to block your path. If you enter a dark barrack you may find yourself in a pavilion overlooking a paradise garden - that disappears when you try to enter it, as if you suddenly awake from a dream.

Animated poem written in VRML. Part of a series of Virtual Poems, or Vpoems. Original website is no longer available, but the poem is viewable as a video stream.

Lucid Mapping and Codex Transformissions in the Z-Buffer is an investigation of textual and narrative possibilities within three dimensional on-screen environments (specifically Virtual Reality Modeling Language, or VRML). Functionally, it is both a text to be read and a space to be surveyed. The various elements of the title -- "lucid mapping," "transformissions," "the Z-buffer" -- are all glossed within the VRML environment itself, so I will not discuss them in detail here. The project evolved from a set of early schematic models. These experiments in "spatial heuristics," as I called them, were not conceived as displays of technical virtuosity; rather, I hoped to begin exploring some of the questions raised by three-dimensional information spaces: How well suited are they to organizing documents according to the non-linear principles pioneered by hypertext developers? How can the addition of a third dimension extend (hyper)textual visualization? What are the conditions required for "narrative" in three-dimensional on-screen environments? And so on . . .

The words in "Secret" are dispersed in the semantic darkness of a potential space. The reader is invited to navigate this space and create verbal and visual links between immaterial presences, voids, and distant signs. This VRML navigational poem was the first poem written directly in VRML.

(author description)

[the perpetual bed] is an online, virtual VRML world in which users can interact with each other from within a navigable, surrealistic narrative. A hybrid between video, interactive art, installation, and animation, the piece is based on my own and my grandmother's experiences within transparent yet tangible beings and places discovered when hospitalized. My creative concerns in creating this piece are numerous, but I am trying to create a new media from the temporal and motion imaging elements of film and video, the accessibility of the internet, the user-centered narrative form from interactive art, and elements of choreography. The interaction will take place through a technology I have designed called Navigable Chat. Users can percieve each other through their textual presence. My goal is to tell a story in an altogether new way -- that of allowing the user to move through a story, to "happen" upon a scene, and to find their own meaning in this ever-enacted place. Users can then leave their mark and become part of the story--leave hints, impressions, etc--for the next viewer.

Home explores the meaning of home, the secrets revealed there, and our emotional relationship to both the place and the intimacies contained therein. A house is for sale; it has been abandoned. Yet it reverberates with the memories of those who lived there and whose most private moments still inhabit the half empty spaces. The user overhears snippets of emotionally charged family conversations, moves down dark corridors and enters into surprising rooms. You eavesdrop, learn secrets, watch. From these fragments the story of this specific home is pieced together, as well as the meaning of home itself.

Using VRML, Home invites you to move through the pretty, flat suburb and into the 3-D world inside the house. This home, like all homes, is constructed from rooms and objects: a coffee cup, a telephone, a moth, a postcard, a slice of pie, a family photo, a bottle of alcohol, a nightlight, a bedside stand, children’s toys, a bathroom mirror, a bathtub, and even a window to the outside. These objects are links to the work of fourteen different artists who were invited by Barbier and Browning to create a piece on the meaning of home. Many of these works are fragments from longer films and videos. Collectively they present different points of view on the psychological, social, and cultural dimensions of home. From this mosaic, a complex narrative of home and its meaning is created.

(Source: Michelle Citron, in "START HERE> An Interdisciplinary Introduction to Electronic Literature")

This VRML piece is a meditation on Euclidean geometry, matter, mortality, eternity and language in all of these contexts. It consists of two spaces, the first of which we experience as a movie that displays four stanzas, each of which expresses Euclidean elements: solid, plane, line, point. The next space is intriguing because it has the four words above, plus two more words, all surrounding a cube made of clusters of 2-3 letters. Navigate this space when the initial movie ends, seeing the different views, and you’ll get the point of what Knoebel is trying to express with this minimalist poem in a virtual environment.

Note: To be able to read this work, you’ll need a VRML client (Recommendations: PC: Cortona 3D Viewer, Mac & Linux: OpenVRML). Be patient: you aren’t able to explore from the outset, only after you’ve seen the views. Right click on the window for a menu of options.

Source: Leonardo Flores,  I ♥ E-Poetry.

Part of his “Words in Space” series, this poem uses VRML to position two dimensional words in different three dimensional rotational axes and provides a minimalist interface for the reader to switch between two types of rotation or movement, signaling the change with an audible click.

The spiraling of the words around a central axis and around each other mimic the speaker’s thought process as he obsesses over what seems to have been a traumatic incident. If we extend the idea of word rotation to its static title, we could read it as “walkdont,” as “dontwalk,” or over time as “walkdontwalkdontwalkdontwalkdont” an idea reinforced by the use of color in three key words and phrases punctuated by the blue “Who knew?”

Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry.

Part of the “Words in Space” series, this deceptively simple poem uses VRML to provide us with a first person point of view of this poem. The lack of control as we fall past the lines, reading them as we go at an accelerating pace, helps us identify with Bill, a roofer “who lost / his footing in the dew / slick plywood.” In this virtual environment, the letters, words and lines gain an architectural physicality that reinforces the poem’s setting. Soft music in the background of this poem sets a sad tone for a situation full of gravitas.

Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry.