The Big Questions
VR, Internet, agents, music, text
In November 1994, the Artifices 3 exhibition presented twelve interactive art installations in Saint-Denis. Maurice Benayoun proposed his first virtual reality installation. created and produced by Z-A Production : Is God flat ? That was the first step extended by the presentation on the Canal + stand to Imagina 1995 in Monte Carlo, of : Is the Devil curved ?
This Virtual Reality (V.R.) installations are based on the same principle :
In Is God flat? we are in a bricked-up room and we can dig corridors in real-time through a three-dimensional material.
For who cares of technical details, here we have a triple performance: the architectural database is rebuilt frame by frame. The visitor can choose any direction on the horizontal plane he wants. The corridors built remain in memory and can cross-check themselves until they form a very complex architectured space. Thus, we can carry out what can be called Boolean operations (intersection of volumes) in real-time. In addition to the concept, the material through which we dig is a 3-D texture, remaining coherent whatever the section axis is. In Is God flat? we dig through bricks. In Is the Devil curved? we dig into a nice blue sky sprinkled with clouds. In And what about me? (online), we don’t dig anymore. And that’s not so bad! The Tunnel under the Atlantic is probably the « biggest » (the only way to qualify it) thing dug in VR, but in a very different way.