Shaping a new medium

Some artists are just lucky: in the right place at the right time with an opportunity to thrive. Others have no choice. For them, the arts become an obsession dictated by a will greater than their own. It appears to be a damning incident until you stop to think about it. Remember Luke Skywalker: no choice, just forced to go on. Gotta go with the force.\n-- Margaret Dolinsky\nLike any avant-garde artist, virtual reality pioneer Margaret Dolinsky has become a prophet of the new gospel.\n"I want the virtual environment to appear as one thing and simultaneously mean a separate other," she said. "I want the world to be presented as some sort of camouflage where we see it or maybe we do not or maybe we mistake it for something else.\n"Virtual reality offers a new paradigm for representing our three dimensions."\nVR as an artform has deep roots that stretch beyond the technological breakthrough. After George Eastman invented the camera in 1888, the face of visual art was forever changed.\nFor centuries, painting had been economically rooted in portraiture. Artists were charged with the task of representing reality -- no frills, no imagination. But Eastman changed all that in one fell swoop.\nWith painting's purpose rendered redundant, artists branched out into experimental genres like cubism and abstract impression. A floodgate had been torn open, unleashing a deluge of creativity. Jackson Pollack was at liberty to splatter paint haphazardly on canvasses, while Mark Rothko could stack rectangular splotches.\nBut with the technological innovation of virtual reality, things have almost seemed to swing full-circle. A few years into the future, frighteningly detailed realist paintings would pale in comparison to the verisimilitude that the three-dimensional format could allow.\nStill, first-generation VR artists like Dolinsky have altogether eschewed the genre of realism.\n"Realism does not help in VR," she says. "There is no established scheme for VR. Think of the Atari Pong game..."\nAnarchic as it is, Dolinsky thinks the advent of VR will have a profoundly shaping effect on visual art.\n"I think VR is the first redefinition of perspective since the Renaissance," she says. "It's possibilities are endless for art, education, science, information visualization..."\nBut Dolinsky concedes the medium is still fledgling.\n"The concept of combining art and VR has always been very clear," she says. "Although I imagine that it will take time to comprehend the strength of their gestalt."\nIt's an art form she's proud to have a shaping hand in.\n"For me as an artist, it is imperative to shape and discover mediums," she says. "The process facilitates the redefinition of space, time, perspective and reality. Artistic representation is always fascinating to me and so much so in VR. The representations I create are more about how the appearance facilitates experience and visa versa."\nOne of its more radical departures from traditional art is its participatory nature, she said.\n"Each day brings about new small epiphanies about choices that we make and reactions that we have," she says. "This dynamic also occurs in VR. Content and meaning are created as the viewers interact and negotiate with the virtual environment.\n"For instance, by approaching a mask -- in my VR worlds they represent the psyche -- I consider it as 'facing' a confrontation. One is willing to look into the eyes of an 'other.' This signals a moment of transition to a new place and time in the world."\nIn a way, despite the surrealist quality of her work, Dolinsky has something in common with Gustave Courbet and others who sought to perfectly replicate vistas. Except that Dolinsky isn't concerned with surfaces -- she wants to cut to the marrow.\n"Art is constantly shifting, changing, in flux," she says. "Like life, it is an experience of emergence, uncertainty, transformation"