**Parallel Space
Saturday July 5th 1997
Talk outlines and Biographies**
Tracey Matthieson
“A number of preoccupations surround my practise within VR such as:
How ideas and concepts might be described through the medium of VR?The medium’s strengths and weaknesses.
Are there features that belong only to the VR medium? If so what are they?
The participation and encouragement of the viewer and the control (or lack) of the artist.
Blurring the edges of real and unreal.
The illusory nature of the medium, and how to respect and yet also challenge the way we interpret space, place and the objects within them.
Where the translation of elements of literal ‘reality’ are useful and where they should not be considered.
recoding ideas about real places into virtual ’landscapes’
To provide an alternative
My projects are a series of experiments looking at the use of VR as an art medium. relationships in VR of space and place, the illusory nature of VR.
The revelation of spaces according to the movement of the user. it focuses on methods to encourage user participation within worlds by visual methods. My most recent works centre around the creation of a virtual system that supports and encourages the viewer through a yet unmade virtual landscape. I designed a system to generate on-the-fly virtual ‘zones’ around the viewer. The randomness of zones is affected only by the viewers choice of movement through the work. The viewer creates their own piece of the work. The system then records the 3D virtual map generated behind the viewer to leave a sense of constancy and an individual path they can retrace if they wish. It is expected that each map will be different.
I am using this work as a vehicle to explore the notions of the permanent, temporary and transient ‘structures’ within the medium of VR and also within computer and viewer memory.”
Tracey Matthieson has just finished her part time research MA at the Centre for Electronic Arts at Middlesex University. She chose to research existing Virtual Environments and create her own experimental spaces. Her intention through her experimental work is to offer an alternative to existing interpretations of the uses of VR. Programming support for the “catalyst map” system was from Rhea Myers.