Spin-Off

The Spin-Off installation began as a way of communicating about the virtual installation-in-progress Dream Vortex. The virtual installation uses a CAVE (Computerized Automatic Virtual Environment) or a 3-D viewer headset, technologies many people have not encountered.

One of the challenges of using these technologies is their unfamiliarity to people who could further the work, a difficulty which is faced by researchers as well as artists, although my computer scientist collaborator found it amusing that I would make physical stuff to represent a virtual project. Spin-Off quickly developed a look and feel of its own, but also stimulated many conversations about 3-D viewing technologies.

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Above: Spin-Off, 2013 (overview)

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About Spin-Off

Spin-Off (2013), mixed media installation, dimensions variable

Spin-Off is, literally, a spin-off of the Dream Vortex project I am making at KeckCAVES and the Complexity Sciences Center at the University of California, Davis. The imagery of Spin-Off parallels the Dream Vortex and the realities of the CAVE, a space with interactive projections.

For example, the virtual reality produced by a CAVE may confuse users about where “reality” stops and starts. A passage in Spin-Off with grids sliding from 2-D image to 3-D material refers to a green grid that pops up in the CAVE if a user is in danger of crashing into the projection screens.

And in the CAVE, image size is elastic. To get a more intimate view, instead of moving towards an image (as with a painting) viewers enlarge it; as suggested in Spin-Off with a red drawing repeated at different scales. Fluid scaling, a common experience for touchpad users, can transport our imaginations but it also destabilizes our relationship with the physical world. This foretells the uneasy mix of pleasure and nightmare in the dream images that follow.

Meredith Tromble

Artist and Author

About Spin-Off

Exhibition