14th July – 9th September 07.

TheSpace4, Peterborough.

Summerbranch is a hyperreal cross-media woodland environment created by Igloo during a residency at Artsway Gallery in the New Forest in 2005. Installed across the three rooms of TheSpace4 gallery in Peterborough from 14th July – 9th September.

The first room contains lenticular prints, a non-interactive projection on one wall, and a suit of an extreme form of sniper camouflage that looks like some moss monster. This sets the scene for presenting an engrossing and haunted hyperreal landscape. That landscape consists of an archetypal woodland. Trees, rocks, ferns and water are scattered across a gently undulating leaf mould and moss ground.

This landscape is first presented as lenticular prints of a virtual scene. Whenever it appears, the level of detail of this virtual environment is astonishing. The SVGA data projectors used in the gallery and the ridges of the lenticular prints break the scene down into coarser pixels or bands than a modern widescreen monitor or high-resolution inkjet print could display it with. The richness of the textures and shading and the density of high-polygon modelling would seem obsessive if not for the convincing illusion of place that necessitates and follows from them.

Lenticular prints are popular with the creators of kitsch religious, commemorative and marketing items such as postcards and cereal box novelties. Consumer cameras capable of capturing the multiple images required to make lenticular prints have been available for decades. In the 1960s, Andy Warhol used large-scale lenticular prints of flowers as part of an installation. But unlike video and VR, there has been no popularization of Lenticular Print technology or techniques for popular production rather than popular consumption.

As you walk by the lenticular prints, they spin, pan, or zoom in and out. The effect is disorienting when the movement of the scene does not relate easily to your own movement. You have to adjust your movements to their framerate and dissociate what your eye sees from what you know your body is doing. You have to suspend your disbelief and accept the veracity of the imaginary scenes that the images present.

On the far wall, a video projector cuts slowly between scenes from what initially appears to be the same virtual environment as the lenticular prints. But it is a real wood, possibly the model for the renderings, recorded by a motionless video camera with a sniper costumed figure lurking in some of the shots. Its haunted emptiness makes it seem as unreal as its presumably inspired virtual environment. The thousands of tiny non-events of light motion and sound in calm woodland are hypnotic. The colours and motion are gentle and gradual, contrasting the harsher lenticular images. The prints and projection complement each other, redoubling the reality of the archetypical woodland(s) that they present.

I found that the walls of the middle room broke this effect. They are covered with wallpaper prints of the virtual forest scene rendered in layered low-resolution pastel-coloured pixels. I have spoken to several other people about the work in this room, all of whom have loved it, so possibly I have failed to see this work in some important way. That possibility raises its head again in my experience of the third room, although in a different way.

The third room is darkened and contains two wall-scale projections of Virtual Realities of the forest scene, one night and one day. Each has a plinth in front of it with a trackball and two buttons on it. Moving forward with one of the buttons is very smooth, but rotating with the trackball is unforgivably headache-inducing. This breaks the suspension of disbelief each time you look around. Fortunately, the visual and sonic richness of the world quickly envelops you again once you stop turning.

Virtual Reality (VR) emerged from late Cold War-era academic and military research. Summerbranch is not a training program for the European Theatre of World War 3, complete with Soviet Troops. It is a simulation of the New Forest, not the Black Forest, and it is at peace, apparently empty of human presence apart from the viewer. But it is haunted by the history of VR both technologically and by the presence of the sniper outfit in the first room.

Early VR systems from the 1980s used advanced display hardware linked to one or more minicomputers. By the early 1990s, cheaper custom hardware was available, and by the mid-1990s, VR was being created using internet-based software on stock personal computers. There were exhibitions of VR at the ICA in London, and excitement grew around the artistic use of the medium. But VRML 2, the HTML of virtual reality, destroyed any company that tried to implement it, and modem-bound internet users baulked at downloading hundreds of kilobytes of mesh and texture data for every location they visited.

Net-based VR and its artistic use had imploded by the end of the 1990s. “First Person Shooter” (FPS) games such as the Quake series surpassed older VR systems and software in power and popularity by the turn of the millennium. The VR torch is being carried by online environments such as Second Life that combine broadband download speeds with the ability to create new environments and objects within the software rather than expensive and cumbersome software intended for architecture or film use.

Using a single-person environment rather than an online VR system is not a technologically determined decision. As well as the unwanted destructive attentions of “griefers”, an online environment would draw other viewers who would destroy the solitude of the piece. There is little point in creating a gallery-based single-user work online, even if the rendering engine can do it. And Second Life currently would have trouble rendering all the details of Summerbranch. Artistic use of computing machinery should be based on the tools fitting the task, not artistic or technological fashion. Igloo has used the right technological tools for the artistic job.

If you are present when one of the environments has to be restarted due to your unseen avatar in the virtual world getting stuck on the edge of a hill polygon, you can see that the environment is rendered using Unreal Engine, a commercial FPS game engine. A decade ago, this kind of environment would not have been possible even with custom “Superscape” hardware.

Using multiple media to present the virtual scene as a complement to the recording of the real scene creates a hyperreal landscape. The reality of this is altered, but not interrupted, in the VRs by the motion-captured dance of moss-covered dancing female forms if you can find them among the foliage. Layer upon layer of invocation of nature, technology and mystery building up to produce the final effect of the work, which consists as much in what is absent as in what is present in it. This experience of the work is hard to put into words, which for a piece of art is a strong sign of its effectiveness.

I did not see the dancing female forms when I first used the VRs, and if the sniper/moss monster forms are in the VRs, I did not find them. Despite trying, I didn’t see them in the video projection on first viewing. Would my experience of the work have been any better if I had found them immediately? Would it have been any worse had I not found them at all? Would this have been a success or failure on the part of the artists or on the part of myself as the viewer? I do not have the answers to these questions, but I suspect that an interactive Fine Art context allows for a more varied, exclusive and hard-won experience than a game or an educational interactive context. Interactive aesthetics very quickly become interactive ethics.

Technically speaking, there is little new for the veteran of art virtual reality. What is new is the way that Igloo places Summerbranch in relation to contemporary art practice and to art history, not as a challenge but as a continuation. There is both a loss and a gain here. The loss is VR’s formal and experiential radicality as an artistic medium, a thread that I hope other practitioners will revive. The gain is a recognition of VR’s broader artistic value to the mainstream art practice, similar to that gained by photography as an art medium after the 1970s.

VR, video and lenticular prints are all low cultural, technological forms with long pedigrees. But they are still unfamiliar enough to have the appearance of modern technology and to surprise and interest people. All are ways of creating 3D illusions mechanically, and deploying them to create illusions of the same imagined world gives a more persuasive reality to that world.

Summerbranch succeeds spectacularly in making the hyperreal experience a rich contemplative encounter with the uncanniness of romantic nature, historical myth and rationalistic technology. This is a rich dialogue between the practices and histories of art and technology. And it is an engaging and meditative artistic spectacle.

Igloo are https://gibsonmartelli.com/works/