In Char Davies' Osmose, a user enters a virtual world by means of a head-mounted display and a motion-tracking vest that monitors the wearer's breathing.
The breathing and body balance of the system's user allows them to navigate the virtual world, which first presents itself as a three-dimensional Cartesian grid that introduces coordinates for orientation.
The user can then explore a forest and other natural environments, including 'Tree', 'Leaf', 'Cloud', 'Pond' and 'Subterranean Earth'. The environments have an element of translucency and use textures that suggest a constant flow of particles.
The virtual world also includes a layer of 'Code' and 'Text', which illustrates the software on which the work is based and quotes from the artist's writings, technology, nature and body. The code and text frame the natural environments in the context of a data space.
Char Davies is internationally recognised for pioneering artworks using the technologies of virtual reality. Originally a painter and filmmaker, Davies transitioned to digital media in the mid-80s when she began exploring 3D computer imaging as a means of expanding depth beyond the picture plane.
In 1987, she became a founding director of Softimage, the 3D software company whose intuitive design philosophy reconfi gured the computer graphics industry. A developer of software tools used for special effects in such landmark fi lms as Jurassic Park, Softimage held its initial public offering on NASDAQ in 1992 and was ultimately acquired by Microsoft.
During her ten years at the company, Davies began adapting the 3D software for her own artistic purposes. Her earliest efforts included the award-winning Interior Body Series (1990-1993), 3D digital still images exhibited in Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia.
Characterised by her painterly aesthetic—of luminous transparency and spatial ambiguity—as well as thematically-entwined references to landscape and the subjectively-felt interior body, these images established Davies' concerns in the digital field. Foremost among such concerns was challenging the bias of 3D computer graphics towards objective realism and linear perspective, and suggesting an experientially rich alternative.
In 1993, Davies began exploring the emerging technology of virtual reality, culminating in the immersive virtual environment Osmose, which premiered at the Museé d'Art Contemporain de Montreal in 1995. Intent on subverting conventional notions of VR as a disembodied medium, Davies and her team developed an innovative interface which uses breathing and balance to enable participants to 'fl oat' through translucent landscapes. Davies' next immersive artwork was Ephémère, which premiered at the National Gallery of Canada in 1998.
Like Osmose and her earlier work, Ephémère goes beyond static objective depictions of landscape and the interior body to present them as spatially-encompassing, fl uxing environments.
