Information
Technology
Descriptions & Essays
Traces is a project for networked CAVEs (immersive VR spaces). But it is very different in its goals and its nature from any other CAVE or VR project (to the knowledge of the author). The root of the project is a long standing concern over the disembodying quality of the VR experience, which stands in stark contrast to the rhetoric around VR, which argues that the experience allows the user to interact in a bodily way with digital worlds. As I first argued in my essay "Virtual Reality as the end of the Enlightenment project" (in "Culture on the Brink", Eds Druckrey and Bender, Bay books 1994), conventional HMD (Head Mounted Display) VR dissects the body, privileging visuality to the exclusion of bodily senses. The body is reduced to a single Cartesian point, the body is checked at the door.
http://www.ace.uci.edu/penny/works/traces/Tracescode.html
Literature
Penny, Simon. »Prefiguring Cyberculture, an intellectual history.« In Traces, edited by Darren Tofts and Annemarie Jonson and Alessio Cavallaro. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
Penny, Simon and Bernhardt et. al. Schulte. »Traces: Embodied Immersive Interaction with Semi-Autonomous Avatars.« Convergence (Summer 2001).
Exhibitions & Events