Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Forget cyberpunk: Char Davies is remaking virtual reality along human lines.
Jun 13, 1998 | I find myself among the stars. As I exhale and fall, the sky goes gray, then bright -- heavens lost against a light that softens and leaves me within a brush stroke forest, among simple, almost calligraphic forms, the trunks of trees that seem to rise into forever. Those stars, like snow, leave the heights and drift down.
I have been here before; in the winters of a New England childhood, amid the crowded thin trunks, the endless oaks of the forest beyond my home.
A stream, black and quick, runs from behind to beyond, and I flow into it, bobbing gently. While I should seize the moment and explore this new world, I am content to relax, and breathe, and watch the moon glide against the sky ...
The water softens; its reflections turn from white to a robin's-egg blue and, gently, other colors appear. The forest floor loses its frosting of snow and becomes a pulsating carpet in yellow and violet, the trees a riot of early, bright leaves -- as if Monet's God has been loosed in this world and paints its spring.
Throw away your preconceived notions of virtual reality. Trash all of the adolescent fantasies of violence and disembodiment of William Gibson, the hormone-charged visions of Neal Stephenson and the weakling efforts of a hundred cyberpunk imitators. With the recent premier of "Iphimhre" at the National Gallery of Canada, Char Davies has redefined our place in cyberspace, and made the virtual world seem more human than our own.
Not that this was entirely unexpected. As a visual artist almost alone in a world of scientists and mathematicians, the Toronto-born Davies has been on a decade-long mission to wipe the slate of the hard-edged black-and-neon engineering-as-aesthetic that everyone associates with virtual reality (think "Tron," or "Johnny Mnemonic"). With a painter's sensibility, Davies has aggressively pursued a single goal: the presentation of an ambiguous vision using that most precise of modern palettes, computer graphics, bringing the body into cyberspace with an interface driven by breath and balance.
Such paradoxical efforts define Davies. A former Marxist who traveled to Deng-era China, she's now a software millionaire. As a painter amid engineers, she explored their code to find expression of her own aesthetic sensibilities; and, although she's the outstanding auteur of the virtual world, she spends most of her time in the gentle woods of southeastern Quebec. Without Davies' constant influence, computer graphics would likely look a lot less natural, incapable of expressing the richness we associate with the living, organic world.
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