Char Davies’ Osmose as Digital Media Art Essay

The emergence of virtual reality is a significant technological achievement that can be used not only as a means of entertainment, education, and design, but also for creating a completely new type of works of fine art. One of the most distinguished artworks produced by using the apparatus of virtual reality was “Osmose” by Charlotte Davies. The people who have the experience of being in this virtual reality were able to explore a vast, breathtaking world. Notably, “Osmose” possesses all the five distinguishing qualities of the digital media as described by Packer and Jordan (2002): integration, interactivity, hypermedia, immersion, and narrativity.

The art project “Osmose”, created in 1995, is a virtual reality artwork which allows its participant, or an “immersant” (as Char Davies calls them), to “float” through a number (about a dozen) of virtual worlds, or “realms” (Packer & Jordan, 2002, p. 294, 295). It “refreshes… ‘ways of seeing’” and perceiving the world around the participants by changing the (perceived) surrounding space and the rules of interaction with it, thus making the “immersant” to give up their usual perceptual habits (Packer & Jordan, 2002, p. 295, 298).

The artwork of Char Davies shows a number of digital media’s distinguishing qualities described by Packer and Jordan (2002). The participant feels as if they are a part of the digital reality when they are floating through the constructed worlds of the watery abysses or deep forests; the feeling of integration with the reality is strong. The “immersants” also were able to interact with the virtual reality, to affect it; many of them claimed that the more they were involved in the digital world, the more they attempted to interact with it and the more emotions they gave, the stronger they felt that the virtual reality was their personal experience rather than the digitally created model (Grau, 2003, p. 200). The work of art might also be considered a hypermedia, for it contains numerous graphical, video, audio elements, is not linear, and refers, even though indirectly, to other works of art.

The participants also experience a strong feeling of immersion in the virtual world; it was already noted that they perceive the virtual reality as a strong personal experience. The people who participated in the project felt as if they were a part of the digital world, travelling through its spaces; as if they were an “embodied being,” according to Char Davies’ expression (as cited in Packer & Jordan, 2002, p. 293). It no wonder, therefore, that the author of the project calls its participants “immersants.” And, finally, narrativity is also a characteristic of the virtual reality of “Osmose”; the participants constantly interact with the world, and even their motions and breath cause them to alter their position in it. They perform actions, but it is apparent that they also see them from their own point of view, as if the world around them unfolds around them and for them.

As it could be seen, “Osmose,” possessing all the five characteristics of the digital media (integration, interactivity, hypermedia, immersion, and narrativity), is an outstanding piece of art which permits its participants to have absolutely new experience, possibly unimaginable otherwise. It is concluded that “the psychological power of this new art of illusion [i.e., virtual reality] becomes apparent in this work as in no other of the genre” (Grau, 2003, p. 199).

References

Grau, O. (2003). Virtual art: From illusion to immersion. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Packer, R., & Jordan, K. (Eds). (2002). Multimedia: From Wagner to virtual reality (expanded edition). New York, NY: Norton.