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Reservations required for viewing
Works from the Cave II Immerses Guests into World of Virtual Reality
An interdisciplinary exhibition presented by the David Winton Bell Gallery, the Multimedia and Electronic Music Experiments program, and the Brown Literary Arts program enables guests to stroll through a variety of virtual realities created by students at Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design. The exhibition, Works from the Cave II, runs on two weekends: April 30 and May 1, and May 7 and 8. Reservations are required. PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Immersive virtual reality is at the heart of Works from the Cave II, an interdisciplinary exhibition presented by the David Winton Bell Gallery, the Multimedia and Electronic Music Experiments program at Brown, and the Brown Literary Arts program.  Cave Music The exhibition runs on two weekends – April 30 and May 1, and May 7 and 8 – in Brown University’s virtual reality “Cave,” the University’s immersive virtual reality laboratory at 180 George St. Inside the eight-foot cubicle, a supercomputer projects high-resolution stereo graphics onto walls and floor to create a virtual reality through which viewers can wander. Reservations are required for the viewings. Brown’s Cave has a unique connection with the literary arts. In 2002, novelist and hypertext expert Robert Coover, an adjunct professor of English at Brown, initiated “Cave Writing” workshops – an ongoing investigation of the literary potential of immersive virtual reality. The workshops take an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together participants with backgrounds in writing, music, visual art, performance and computer science. Graduate and undergraduate students from Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design created the works in this year’s exhibition, and in some cases collaborated with John Cayley, a visiting artist from the United Kingdom, and Sascha Becker, a professional computer graphics researcher in Brown’s Graphics Lab. Some works invite the viewer to wander through real or imagined three-dimensional spaces – a museum of natural history populated by intimidating figures, the Rockefeller Library transformed into a maze, a Word Museum. Text-based works such as Torus and Screen create new reading experiences made possible when text no longer needs to appear on a surface, but can hang as individual letters in space, or break into words that swarm around the reader. A third group of pieces uses the Cave to create new types of performance. In Cave Music, viewers compose music by grasping, bouncing, moving or in other ways interacting with colored balls floating through an abstract environment. In another, the Cave becomes a virtual set for a digital interpretation of Japanese Noh theater. Featured works will include the premières of Torus: Work in Progress by Cayley and Dmitri Lemmerman, and Word Museum by William Gillespie and David Dao, as well as selections from the 2005 Cave Writing workshop led by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Shawn Greenlee. Two separate programs will be presented. Program I on April 30 and May 1, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Program II on May 7 – 8, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Reservations are required. Please contact the Bell Gallery at (401) 863-2932 for reservations or further information. ###### News Service Home | Top of File | e-Subscribe | Brown Home Page | ||||