Convergence culture: A new wave of artists is plumbing the depths of virtual worlds for fresh inspiration, writes Haydn Shaughnessy
Film-makers and artists in the past may have imagined strange worlds, as Stanley Kubrick did in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but never before have we been able to produce worlds that appear real and which we interact with, but that do not exist.
We are now creating visual environments that were previously unimaginable. They arise out of the interaction between imagination and a technology that is designed to be amoral and, therefore, they respect no tradition or boundary, which in turn gives rise to unusual degrees of novelty.
How does art deal with amoral virtual worlds? Shahzia Sikander is due to appear at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Imma) later this month. The New York-based, Pakistan-born artist originally painted miniatures, echoing the labour-intensive tradition of ancient Islamic art. She now uses a scanner to digitise miniaturised images and then uses image-editing software to digitally mutate the miniatures into entirely new and wondrous visual displays.
It's questionable whether the original respect paid by her to the art of miniatures remains in the final digital artwork. The digital form has the effect of stripping away moral layers. In the purely virtual world, morality can and does break down.
Patrick Lichty, a New Orleans-born artist, has ascended into the virtual world of Second Life, where he experiences and reports on humans behaving madly. Let off the leash from everyday norms they, in Lichty's orbit at least, explode virtual nuclear bombs, drive at reckless speeds and have random sex with other guests.
To anybody who does not believe the "virtual" is important to meaning, spending some time watching people do these things may convince you otherwise. The virtual is invested with confused and often disturbing values. It is an ephemeral existence but one that exudes significance.
When artists explore mixed realities they often do so self-consciously, making the viewer aware that their images are a product of technology. This, at least, is a change in the relationship between artist and technology from that which dominated the 20th century. As Sean Kissane, exhibitions curator at the Imma, explains, artists have traditionally seen technology as integral to globalisation, destructive of local cultures, and therefore something to rail against.
Dublin-based performance artist Nathaniel Stern sees it differently:"Artists have always been technologists. Writing is technology and so too is flint." Like a growing number of artists he uses scanning technology to take images into the digital world.
"With my performance art, I strap a scanner to my body and perform. The focal points are where I rest. This way the viewer imagines my performance," he explains. In other words, he uses technology to communicate, just like I use my word processor. The essential difference is that Stern wants to get an audience inside the performance, absorbed or assimilated into a place where they are challenged by new perspectives.
It's the kind of thinking that also lies behind what are called immersive environments. You may remember seeing the first wave of virtual-reality machines where "viewers" donned gloves and goggles and were then invited to immerse themselves through sensors and three-dimensional projections. These hugely expensive immersive environments have now reached consumer prices. At the Collaborative Advanced Navigation Virtual Art Studio, at the Krannert Art Museum in the University of Illinois, Champaign, technologists have devised a virtual environment that costs about $1,000 (€758) to set up.
While the world wide web invites you into virtual worlds where your interaction with other people is taken on by an avatar, in the cheap immersive world "viewers" of art can engage with it through sight, touch, feel and emotion.
This apparently extreme proposition is merely a stepping stone on the way to new visual experiences that we have already signed up to by using the internet. But it is the moral ambiguity that we're failing to address.
Arguably, we have been virtual since the invention of the telephone. It is the telephone that first gave us the experience of presence when there was no presence, or rather altered presence, from a physical to a virtual "fact". Over the past two years our experience of the unreal has continued to gather pace.
• Shahzia Sikander will be exhibiting at Imma from Mar 28. See Nathaniel Stern's work at www.nathanielstern.com
Words in Your Ear
Immersive environments- computer-created environments where you engage with images through senses other than your sight. Typically, they simulate your presence in a scene.
Scanner art- artists are increasingly using scanners like those you see on desktops to digitise real artefacts and then work on them in a digital environment.
