"Alive on the Grid" is a virtual reality art installation developed
collectively by Dan Sandin, the director of EVL, and 18 other digital
artists throughout the world. Among them is Josephine Anstey, assistant
professor in the UB Department of Media Study, who studied at EVL with
Sandin, who curates this and other virtual reality art projects.
The original installation was a networked international environment
of sorts that for three days in September hosted a "virtual atrium"
that housed several interactive art worlds built by participants.
Wearing lightweight head and hand trackers, visitors from six sites
in the U.S. and Europe entered these specially created "worlds" to interact
with the art itself and with other users at distant sites who were "virtually"
sharing the space with them.
At UB, the site of interaction was the portable ImmersaDesk, a one-wall,
virtual-reality environment in the Center for Computational Research
(CCR). Four-wall, theater-style virtual reality environments are called
CAVEs and were invented by Sandin. The project was made possible through
the use of Internet2, the high-speed, broad-bandwidth network.
For the digital summit, Anstey and her team will produce a local, stand-alone,
version of "Alive on the Grid" that will be exhibited on the ImmersaDesk
in the Center for the Arts Atrium. It will demonstrate how participants
can engage in real-time interactions in virtual space from several campus
locations.
"Alive on the Grid" players are represented to the other players by
a virtual avatar with a photo-realistic, 3-dimensional face. Using their
avatars, users are able to navigate and interact with others in real
time. The avatars cannot be seen in their entirety by the persons they
represent—just as we cannot see ourselves when we interact with
others—but they can be seen and recognized by other players.
The avatars not only are able to visit the virtual worlds, but to create
and alter them, leaving "ghosts" of themselves for others to view. Participating
art teams created special sites for visitation by the other players.
For the original project, the UB team created a dance hall site that
turned out to be very popular.
Players and their avatars demonstrated their dancing chops and were
able to create dancing characters—usually abstracted, humorous
figures—whom they could "leave behind," dancing their "hearts"
out in their creators' absence. The hall ended up hosting quite a crowd
of these hip-hopping "ghosts" crafted of peculiar colors and forms.
In fact, all of the worlds, including the dance hall, were persistent,
meaning they continued to grow and collect information from remote participants
on the Grid, even after festival users leave the environment.
In addition to EVL and UB, four sites world-wide participated in "Alive
on the Grid:" the Interactive Institute and Tools for Creativity Studio
in Umea, Sweden; the C3 Center for Culture & Communication Foundation,
Budapest, Hungary; the H.R. Hope School of Fine Arts, University Information
Technology Services and the Advanced Visualization Laboratory, all at
Indiana University, and V2 Lab/V2 Organization Institute for the Unstable
Media in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, in collaboration with the Technische
Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e) and Stichting Academisch Rekencentrum
Amsterdam (SARA).
