CHAR DAVIES: EPHEMERE
PREMIERES AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA
from 26 June to 7 September 1998

The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa) is proud to present the world
premiere of Ephemere (1998), an interactive, fully immersive virtual
reality installation by the Canadian artist Char Davies. Ephemere is a
spatially-enveloping audio-visual environment based on metaphorical
elements of nature and landscape, flesh and bone, suggesting a symbolic
correspondence between body and earth. It will be on view in Video
Gallery B209.

As in all of Davies's work, Ephemere is based on landscape as metaphor,
situating the participant in the midst of an enveloping ephemeral world
of imagery and sound. The virtual world's appearance is linked to the
participant's own behaviour. Interaction in Ephemere is based on the
wearing of a head-mounted display, and a vest which tracks breath and
balance, allowing the participant to float within the work by simply
breathing: this contemplative hands-free approach is highly unusual for
VR. The central experience of the work involves solitary immersion in a
private chamber: adjacent to this is a larger space where visitors can
watch and listen to the immersant's journey as it takes place in real
time, via a live video/audio projection generated from the immersant's
point of view. They can also watch a shadow silhouette of the
immersant's body as he/she moves in response to the work, a strategy
which serves to emphasize the subjective body's role as experiential
ground.

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Opening Event

On Friday 26 June at 5 pm in the Lecture Hall, Char Davies will present
a lecture entitled Osmose and Ephemere: Landscape, Body, Earth and Time
in Immersive Virtual Space. This will be followed at 6 pm by a viewing
of the work in Video Gallery B209 and a reception in the Upper Rotunda.