Luc Courchesne: Where are you?

For his installation “Where are you?” (2005) Canadian artist Luc Courchesne created the Panoscope 360, a spatial display for virtual environments. It features a half-sphere used as a panoramic screen, placing the user at the center of the virtual space. The installation looks impressive enough, and no doubt gives a great sense of space. The content (as seen in the video) looks like familiar Virtual Reality fare, such as disembodied flying faces, virtual terrains and the use of grid configurations to reinforce the feeling of space.

VR was one of the biggest anti-climaxes of the 1990s. It was hyped to the heavens by technovisionaries and pomo posterboys, yet the technology was frequently brittle and prohibitively expensive. And let’s face it: It almost never delivered the goods. The result was embarrassing, and VR was conveniently forgotten like an embarrassing teenage trespass.

Most VR-based art projects have turned out to be either glorified tech demos or navigable 3D environments without any real content. There are of course some very notable exceptions. Char Davies’ "Osmose" and Jeffrey Shaw’s "Legible City" are both excellent works using the technology intelligently. Marcos Novak remains one of the foremost architects of virtual space, consistently eccentric and unpragmatic.

The downside to the stigma now connected to VR, is that it can make for very engaging installations. As seen in Panoscope 360, it certainly has the potential to make the screen disappear. In theatre the phrase “fourth wall” refers to the invisible wall separating actors and audience. For digital media the fourth wall is the screen, and it remains a worthwhile endeavour to break it down.

Original link from we-make-money-not-art.