Camera Obscura in Virtual Realiyt – VR Art Performance
2017
— Jonathan Crary
The project took the camera obscura—one of the earliest devices used to construct and mediate vision; as its conceptual starting point. Historically, the camera obscura positioned the observer inside a darkened chamber, separating the viewer from the external world while producing an image understood as a representation of reality. Drawing on Jonathan Crary’s writings on vision and modernity, the project reconsidered this relationship through virtual reality, where the distinction between observer, image and environment becomes increasingly unstable. The virtual environment was imagined as a contemporary dark room. Wearing an HTC Vive headset, participating artists entered an immaterial space in which they could create directly in three dimensions. Instead of observing an image from the outside, they became physically involved in its production; moving through, around and within what they created.
By bringing the camera obscura into dialogue with virtual reality, the project questioned how technologies of vision influence our perception of space, time and reality. While the camera obscura once established a fixed relationship between the observer and the visible world, VR offered a different condition: one in which the image no longer had to correspond to an external reality and could instead become an inhabitable spatial experience. The workshop therefore approached virtual reality not simply as a new artistic medium, but as a contemporary apparatus of perception. It invited artists to experiment with a space without conventional physical boundaries and to reconsider the relationship between the body, the image and the act of seeing.
Year 2017
Location Mixer, Istanbul
Type VR Art Workshop / Live Performance
Collaboration Mixer × Apollo Digital & Architecture
Role Creative Direction, Experience Design