David Hudson wrote:

>From Wired's page on _Osmose_, accessible via:
>http://www.hotwired.com/wired_online/4.08/osmose/index.html:

>"a virtual reality installation that you can only
>find in an art gallery or electronic art ahow…

>"…an experience Mark Pesce calls 'virtual
>kundalini, an expression of philosophy
>without any words, a state of holy being
>which reminds us that, indeed, we are
>all angels.'…

>"…Osmose's 'sensuous, luminous, and
>deeply enveloping world of cloud
>forests, dark pools, and verdant
>canopies.'

>"The albeit beautiful work,
>[Wired writer] Davis argues, is much more than just
>painting pretty pictures in 3-D. This is art."

>Anybody seen this? The actual installation, I mean. Is it?

Actually I've seen it here in New York at the Ricco Maresca Gallery last fall.
The exhbition was called CODE http://artnetweb.com/gallery/code/home.html What I
saw was a 3-d video. You had to wear glasses to view it properly. It was really
beautiful, very Zen like. The synthetic forest/river environment looked like a
cross between Walt Disney's Fantasia and a Star Trek episode. But, the visuals
were informed with a sense of life that pushed it beyond eidetic representation.

There was also a sort of infinite grid structure that presented a sort of cold
view of geometric cyberspace. It was environmental in it's sensation. I liked it
but I don't necessarily feel it is great art. Somehow it operates in a space
between a theme park virtual reality exhibit and modernist paintings' minimal/
structural conceit.

This particular strain of scientistic type art is fairly rampant on the web and
in cyberart in general. I feel the rigid structures of abstraction are as boring
in virtual reality as they are in oil painting. After the initial gee-whiz of VR
there's no content worth remembering. I find art which has the contemplative as
its content to be sophomoric in the extreme. If I want to be refreshed as a human
being, I think going to the mountains and breathing clean air is a lot simpler.