French artist Jackie Matisse creates new Virtual Art Form at Virginia TechBlacksburg 03 April 2002 French artist Jackie Matisse, creator of kite-like art works, will premiere a new art form when her kites fly in Virginia Tech's virtual reality CAVE and take people along for the ride. Now people can float along with the kites through the technology of the CAVE during a public workshop Jackie Matisse will conduct at Virginia Tech in April, her first workshop in the United States.
Matisse, granddaughter of one of the top two 20th-century artists, Henri Matisse, and step-daughter of artist Marcel Duchamp, creates teflon or crepe kites, with artistic tails as long as 15 feet, that can soar through the air, ripple through water, or undulate with the air currents in a room. Students and the public also can help Matisse create new kites while they wait to visit the CAVE. The artist, the students, and the public will be part of a new artistic technology now being explored and researched at Virginia Tech.
Matisse's programme at Virginia Tech is threefold: the public workshop and CAVE experience on Friday, April 12; a public exhibition of Matisse's art works, "Art Flying In and Out of Space", in Virginia Tech's Perspective Art Gallery April 9-May 2; and a workshop for regional artists and Virginia Tech students at Mountain Lake, Virginia, on April 13-14.
With the CAVE experience, Matisse adds a new dimension of social interaction, as people actually feel they are flying along with the kites. Jackie Matisse's work has been shown throughout Europe and in the Far East, as well as in Paris and New York.
When visitors enter the CAVE, they will be surrounded on four sides by three-dimensional projections of the art works. They can control their environment through a "wand" and specially designed goggles. The visitors can fly along with the kites, go through the kites, swim with the kites, and have the closest experience possible to actually being right with the kites as they soar, float, twist, and turn.
Ron Kriz, director of the CAVE, compared the experience to becoming small and going through the CRT screen into the three-dimensional world there. The experience of the CAVE, he said, is "not just for science and engineering".
The virtual reality production of Matisse's works is an international and interdisciplinary co-operative event involving Virginia Tech's School of the Arts, Visualization and Animation Group and Virtual Reality CAVE; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Arlington; physicists at the University of Illinois; and SARA, the virtual reality and supercomputer center in Amsterdam.
With Matisse as artistic director, Virginia Tech art student Francis Thompson serves as project co-ordinator as part of his thesis work. He and other students have visited Matisse in France and have worked at SARA to prepare her works for the CAVE.
Tom Coffin of the Supercomputing Center in Arlington developed the programme and scanned Matisse's works for use in the CAVE. Physicist Shalini Venkataraman and Jason Leigh at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana created the code to put the works into the illusionistic movement in the CAVE.
Matisse's CAVE piece will simultaneously be exported electronically to project partners, including SARA and the University of Illinois's CAVE facility. The programme will have a second premier at SARA. The Mountain Lake Workshop for artists and students will feature a presentation by Matisse. In addition, top names in the art world, such as Howard Risatti, will give talks. Tom Coffin will lecture on virtual reality's relation to art.
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