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Additional Information: Hiding Spaces:
Cynthia
Beth Rubin Daniel
F. Keefe
Hiding Spaces: a Cave of Elusive Immateriality is the result of an ongoing collaboration between an artist with extensive experience in a variety of digital media, and an artist/computer science researcher. When we began working together in summer of 2001, we each brought an interest in incorporating aspects of the lively painting tradition in the Cave. Cynthia Beth Rubin, trained as a painter in the days when the philosophy of the American Abstract Expressionists reigned, had already incorporated a painter’s sensibility in the production of digital images, both fixed and animated. Daniel Keefe had already worked to develop CavePainting, an interface for bringing the gestural expressionist movements of painters into a 3D environment. Nonetheless, it was not immediately clear how the 2D focus of one would fit with the 3D focus of the other. The delight of this collaboration is that our seemingly disparate interests provided just the right mix to move us toward developing a new aesthetic based on the mixing of space and representation. It is important to note that each of us has contributed to both the technical and the artistic development of the work through brainstorming the look and feel of the project, as well as the actual production of the images, forms, and interactive techniques. This is a work in progress, in that we are continuing to experiment with combining various textures and surfaces to the walls and 3D forms, as well as creating 3D gestural forms to respond to these images and to inhabit the space. Over the next few months, we will solidify one or more states of the work, much as a printmaker creates states of an image by introducing new elements and slightly altering the process. The timing of SIGGRAPH should be just right for feedback in the process. By July, the basic format and use of tools outlined in the submission will have prompted us to produce more examples for discussion. It is worth noting that both
of the us are now part of larger collaboration of artists and computer
scientists working on a scientific visualization project. This larger
group began meeting about 5 months after we began our collaboration, but
the opportunity to collaborate in another arena, with related tools, will
undoubtedly contribute to this effort in unexpected ways over the coming
months. Since ambiguous space and changing perceptions are in fact an
aspect of how we see and think outside of the art world, this work may
lead to unexpected results in scientific visualization in general, and
the development of new tools for all applications of visual communication
within the VR Cave environment.
© 2002 (images and text ) Rubin//Keefe
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