SwanQuake: House
igloo (Ruth Gibson & Bruno Martelli)
v22 Ashwin Street
Thursday October 16, 2008 to Monday November 3, 2008

Igloo’s “Summerbranch” was an ultra-detailed virtual reality environment depicting a woodland landscape populated by incorporeal dancing figures as day changed to night. Their new work “House”, the first part of the ongoing “SwanQuake” project, has an urban setting but it is is no less uncanny. As installed at v22 Ashwin Street the realisation and presentation of House continues and intensifies some of the most successful aspects of Summerbranch.

House features the penthouse apartment of the title overlooking a stormy street, the stairwell of an apartment block, the tunnels of a Tube station, and more fantastic elements such as a burnt-out tube train that leads to a portal to hell. Occasionally, ghostly female figures dance endlessly through graceful choreography trapped in time and space.

The darkly lit corridors, tunnels and rooms rendered by a first-person shooter (FPS) game engine and haunted by impersonal ghostly figures immediately call to mind the survival horror genre. There’s an unsettling feel to the environment, even when the feeling of threat gives way to a sense of wonder in the underground warehouse filled with joyfully dancing figures.

The gritty realism of stairwell and underground are joined to House’s more fantastic elements almost casually. Hell, the underground hangar and rocky tunnels lead to and from the haunted almost reality closer to the surface. One element that hangs between the real and the unreal it the burnt out tube train that brought the terror attack on the tube of 2005, or further back the damage of the Blitz, to mind. But the Tube station sign reads “Fackin Ell”.

House is rendered using the proprietary FPS game engine “Unreal Engine”, despite SwanQuake’s title reference to a more famous FPS game engine. The dancing figures are animated from motion capture data taken from real dancers.

On a technical level, the modelling of the environments and the smooth motion of the animated figures is superb. This technical competence marks igloo’s work out aesthetically compared to the shaky, performance-destroying motion capture of Hollywood movies and compared to the limitations of combat games that must balance the complexity of environments with the complexity of network-controlled player character and monster models. Control of the medium is vital for expression, and igloo demonstrate this.

On a conceptual level, there is something about taking the aesthetics of dance and real-time 3D games as a point of departure that reverses the aestheticization of the bodily movement of violence through technology of the Matrix films or the fragmenting body horror of FPS and survival games that is so prevalent in popular culture. Dance is a grammar of living bodies, shooting games are the choreography of dying bodies. SwanQuake achieves a critical distance from a pervasive and important part of contemporary popular culture in this way that many artists are happy to ironise only for nostalgia or shock value.

Summerbranch was presented as video projections on walls in a darkened gallery, with the track-ball controls on podiums on the floor. House has a more modest scale but a unique means of presentation. A wide screen on a wooden dresser or desk, with the trackball and buttons set into its surface. It looks like a bedroom Memex, Vannevar Bush’s imagined prototype knowledge work device that would have been a desk with a microfiche reader built in. It provides a domestic frame for House even in the gallery space, taking control of the presentation and interaction with the virtual environment. This is a successful solution to some of the issues of how exactly to display new media art in a gallery. And it’s great fun to use, if even more prone to producing motion sickness than Summerbranch.

Igloo’s environments are site-specific in a way that is surprising for VR. Summerbranch was developed at Artsway Gallery in the New Forest and depicts an area of that forest. House depicts Igloo’s own apartment and the gallery that it is being exhibited in among its other elements. It’s a shock to realize that you have wandered in the game into the gallery that you are physically stood in.

The gallery, the real gallery, includes elements of the game in return. The lighting of the gallery has been carefully set low, and at first you might not notice that some parts of the wall next to the desk in the first room is not actually brick but is actually bitmaps of bricks printed on vinyl and mounted on panels. The second room has an entire wall replaced with a bitmap.

The textures are from the game engine representation of the gallery and have the slightly contrasty, mach-banded, pixelated but smoothed and blurred look of compressed photographically derived bitmaps. At first, they look real, then a sneaking suspicion is followed by the shock of realization that they are unreal. The show is structured as a linear series of environments that increase the real space’s unreality and the virtual space’s reality each time.

Between the second and last rooms in the real gallery is a darkened corridor that screams “survival horror FPS”. At one end of it an oval mirror frame surrounds a projection of a scene from the VR version of a corridor, slowly moving (Igloo tell me that it is seen from the point of view of one of the dancers). A single bare light bulb, reflected in the projection, hangs at the other end. There’s an unsettling feedback between the real and the unreal.

The final room has only its ceiling and floor uncovered. Printed bitmap panels completely cover the walls. It’s a shock to realize that they are unreal. It is as if you have passed through the mirror in the corridor. One of the bitmaps is a reflection of the one opposite; even the light switch is a texture map. Returning to the other rooms and using the virtual environment again is a different experience after this crescendo of tension between reality and virtuality.

House is a more difficult virtual environment to navigate than Summerbranch. I missed entire areas, including, vitally, the gallery, and I couldn’t steer the camera through the door to the penthouse. The competence of the viewer is always a variable in the experience of art, but interactive multimedia makes this explicit and a matter of the practical performance of the viewer. Seeing the real and projected light bulb-lit corridors without seeing the gallery in the virtual environment was unsettling. But having seen the corridor in the environment was head-spinning. Is it unfair that some viewers will miss this, or is it just a technological reflection of the fact that every viewer will experience every artwork differently modulated by their competences? House exposes these issues in a way that the more open environment of Summerbranch didn’t so such a degree.

The relationship between reality, representation and unreality is at the core of the installation of House, expressed through a tangent to the aesthetics of one of the paradigmatic embodiments of that relationship: FPS games and the other of its hyper-masculine body choreographies and Bond Villain fantasy architecture. This remains a key part of the experience of contemporary culture. igloo’s effective combination of real and virtual space embodies and opens it up. It is a satisfying spectacle in itself, and it rewards extended viewing and reflection.

SwanQuake: House
igloo (Ruth Gibson & Bruno Martelli)
v22 Ashwin Street
Thursday October 16, 2008 to Monday November 3, 2008

Igloo’s “Summerbranch” was an ultra-detailed virtual reality environment depicting a woodland landscape populated by incorporeal dancing figures as the day changed to night. Their new work, “House”, the first part of the ongoing “SwanQuake” project, has an urban setting, but it is no less uncanny. As installed at v22 Ashwin Street, the realisation and presentation of House continues and intensifies some of the most successful aspects of Summerbranch.

House features the penthouse apartment of the title overlooking a stormy street, the stairwell of an apartment block, the tunnels of a Tube station, and more fantastic elements such as a burnt-out tube train that leads to a portal to hell. Occasionally, ghostly female figures dance endlessly through graceful choreography trapped in time and space.

The darkly lit corridors, tunnels and rooms rendered by a first-person shooter (FPS) game engine and haunted by impersonal ghostly figures immediately call the survival horror genre to mind. The environment has an unsettling feel, even when the feeling of threat gives way to a sense of wonder in the underground warehouse filled with joyfully dancing figures.

The gritty realism of the stairwell and underground are joined to House’s more fantastic elements almost casually. The underground hangar and rocky tunnels lead to and from the haunted reality closer to the surface. One element that hangs between the real and the unreal is the burnt-out tube train that brought the terror attack on the tube of 2005, or further back the damage of the Blitz, to mind. But the Tube station sign reads “Fackin Ell”.

House is rendered using the proprietary FPS game engine “Unreal Engine”, despite SwanQuake’s title referencing a more famous FPS game engine. The dancing figures are animated from motion capture data taken from real dancers.

Technically, the environment’s modelling and the animated figures’ smooth motion are superb. This technical competence marks igloo’s work out aesthetically compared to the shaky, performance-destroying motion capture of Hollywood movies and compared to the limitations of combat games that must balance the complexity of environments with the complexity of network-controlled player characters and monster models. Control of the medium is vital for expression, and igloo demonstrates this.

On a conceptual level, there is something about taking the aesthetics of dance and real-time 3D games as a point of departure that reverses the aestheticization of the bodily movement of violence through the technology of the Matrix films or the fragmenting body horror of FPS and survival games that is so prevalent in popular culture. Dance is a grammar of living bodies, and shooting games are the choreography of dying bodies. SwanQuake achieves a critical distance from a pervasive and important part of contemporary popular culture in this way that many artists are happy to ironise only for nostalgia or shock value.

Summerbranch was presented as video projections on walls in a darkened gallery, with the track-ball controls on podiums on the floor. House has a more modest scale but a unique means of presentation. A widescreen on a wooden dresser or desk, with the trackball and buttons set into its surface. It looks like a bedroom Memex, Vannevar Bush’s imagined prototype knowledge work device that would have been a desk with a built-in microfiche reader. It provides a domestic frame for House, even in the gallery space, taking control of the presentation and interaction with the virtual environment. This is a successful solution to some of the issues of how exactly to display new media art in a gallery. And it’s great fun to use, if even more prone to producing motion sickness than Summerbranch.

Igloo’s environments are site-specific in a way that is surprising for VR. Summerbranch was developed at Artsway Gallery in the New Forest and depicts an area of that forest. House depicts Igloo’s apartment and the gallery it is being exhibited in, among its other elements. It’s a shock to realize that you have wandered into the game into the gallery that you are physically standing in.

The gallery, the real gallery, includes elements of the game in return. The lighting of the gallery has been carefully set low, and at first, you might not notice that some parts of the wall next to the desk in the first room is not actually brick but are actually bitmaps of bricks printed on vinyl and mounted on panels. The second room has an entire wall replaced with a bitmap.

The textures are from the game engine representation of the gallery and have the slightly contrasty, mach-banded, pixelated but smoothed and blurred look of compressed photographically derived bitmaps. At first, they look real, then a sneaking suspicion is followed by the shock of the realization that they are unreal. The show is structured as a linear series of environments that increase the real space’s unreality and the virtual space’s reality each time.

Between the second and last rooms in the real gallery is a darkened corridor that screams “survival horror FPS”. At one end of it, an oval mirror frame surrounds a projection of a scene from the VR version of a corridor, slowly moving (Igloo tell me that it is seen from the point of view of one of the dancers). A single bare light bulb, reflected in the projection, hangs at the other end. There’s an unsettling feedback between the real and the unreal.

The final room has only its ceiling and floor uncovered. Printed bitmap panels completely cover the walls. It’s a shock to realize that they are unreal. It is as if you have passed through the mirror in the corridor. One of the bitmaps is a reflection of the one opposite. Even the light switch is a texture map. Returning to the other rooms and using the virtual environment again is a different experience after this crescendo of tension between reality and virtuality.

House is a more difficult virtual environment to navigate than Summerbranch. I missed entire areas, including, vitally, the gallery, and I couldn’t steer the camera through the door to the penthouse. The competence of the viewer is always a variable in the experience of art, but interactive multimedia makes this explicit and a matter of the practical performance of the viewer. Seeing the real and projected light bulb-lit corridors without seeing the gallery in the virtual environment was unsettling. But having seen the corridor in the environment was head-spinning. Is it unfair that some viewers will miss this or is it just a technological reflection of the fact that every viewer will experience every artwork differently modulated by their competences? House exposes these issues in a way that the more open environment of Summerbranch didn’t so such a degree.

The relationship between reality, representation and unreality is at the core of the installation of House, expressed through a tangent to the aesthetics of one of the paradigmatic embodiments of that relationship; FPS games and the other of its hyper-masculine body choreographies and Bond Villain fantasy architecture. This remains a key part of the experience of contemporary culture. igloo’s effective combination of real and virtual space embodies and opens it up. It is a satisfying spectacle in itself, and it rewards extended viewing and reflection.

https://gibsonmartelli.com/swanquake-the-user-manual/

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.