Virtual Hieroglyphics

Though it just rolls off the lips, the phrase "virtual reality" is an oxymoron. \nIt's something Margaret Dolinsky never hesitates to point out. \nBut it's not just some random crack from her conversational repertoire. It's a subject Dolinsky is constantly mulling over -- she's spent most of her adult life working with virtual reality as an art form. \nA pioneer of virtual art and life-long academic, Dolinsky has found her home on the Bloomington campus. She's currently a visiting professor of the fine arts and an information technology research assistant. \n"At each step of the road," she jokes, "my art education has been partially financed by a computer scientist somewhere." \nDolinsky came to this neck of the woods for the opportunity to work with CAVE technology, or the Cave Automatic Visualization Environment. It's the canvas with which she plies her craft. \nA VR display theater, the CAVE is an eight-foot cube with three walls and a floor that fits up to nine people. It looks unassuming enough before one dons the requisite stereoscopic shutter glasses and a tracking wand. \nOne is then plunged into a surreal netherworld, an entirely immersive experience as trippy as it is indescribable. Objects -- generally faces, masks and squat, troll-like figures -- leap out at the viewer while the boundaries in the background all bleed into one another. \nVisual art is traditionally static, a flash of inspiration transcribed and hung up on the wall. \nBut Dolinsky defies artistic convention with her atmospheric dreamscapes, fluid and ever shifting. Being in the CAVE is nothing like milling about a museum or gallery on a languid Sunday afternoon. \n"I try to present images that are inviting and confrontational at the same time," she says. "I want to create an experience that is dream-like, whimsical and subversively confrontational." \nA tracking system enables the participant to interact with Dolinsky's otherworldly environments, whether the baroque interior of a castle or a lunar vista. Triggered by the user's motions, the tracking system creates live feed based on the program output. \nQuite literally, no two people experience a Dolinsky piece in the same way. \nAnd while words might not do justice to Dolinsky's work, she wants you to talk about the experience. \n"I want to emulate the real world but I want to excavate the world of the unconscious by creating worlds that must be initially accepted for later processing," she says. "It's much like recounting a dream. You learn more when you retell the experience out loud later." \nWith regard to her muses, Dolinsky rattles off a varied list: "James Joyce, Lewis Carroll, Salmon Rushdie, Buddha, politics, the rubric cube, the TV Guide crossword puzzles, Rob Brezny's astrology, full moons and chocolate." \nIt's probably for the best that her inspiration cuts such a wide swath. Putting together a VR piece is no light task, taking months and sometimes even years. \n"I tend to work and rework the experience until it exhausts me," she says. "There are technical considerations and creative development stages. And I have to make considerations for others who will actually be within the environment." \nCalling for specialized training, it's a complicated affair. Picasso never had to trouble himself with computer programming. \n"Creating these environments is a multi-faceted expedition," she says. "First I must establish a system with the computer and then a framework for coding the environment, then there are the design aspects. \n"How will the interface work? How will the content be reflected through the imagery and the choices a person can make? How will the environment indicate passages and choices for navigation?" \nDolinsky has to grapple with dozens of such questions whenever she starts work on another piece. But she presses on, convinced as she is that virtual reality is the artistic medium of the future. As incredible as it might sound, Atari and Nintendo led her to this conclusion. \n"I watched with interest as video games became popular," she says. "And as I watched the computer saturate every dimension of our lives, I recognized the potential. When I heard about virtual reality, that sounded very new and interesting. I liked the experiential nature of the medium and the fact that it was a largely unexplored territory. I wanted to be involved in something that was yet to be defined." \nDolinsky brought a solid background in the fine arts to her expedition. A painter first and foremost, she also studied and practiced pottery and intaglio printmaking. \n"With clay I realized the dimensionality to seeing all sides of an object and how to shape an idea into tangible existence," she says. "With intaglio, I realized by etching multiple layers that there is a multifaceted dynamic to the development of idea and form. \n"Painting taught my eyes to sing." \nAnd she found the creative liberty in virtual reality that had only been a distant dream. \n"The most exciting aspects of VR include the unique ability to generate imagery, view it in three dimensions and manipulate it in real time," she says. "Due to its visual and experimental nature, the CAVE theater display system lends itself well to dynamic art applications." \nDolinsky's art starts with applications, strings of binary code entered into a computer. But it ends in a vibrant dreamscape, extracted from the depths of a dream.