Distributed April 14, 2003
For Immediate Release

News Service Contact: Mary Jo Curtis



April 26 and May 3, 2003

Bell Gallery and Creative Arts Council to exhibit Works from the Cave

The David Winton Bell Gallery and the Creative Arts Council will present Works from the Cave in limited exhibition on April 26 and May 3, 2003, in the University’s virtual reality lab at the Technology Center for Advanced Scientific and Computing Visualization. This exhibit is free and open to the public, but advanced reservations are required.


PROVIDENCE, R.I. – The David Winton Bell Gallery and the Creative Arts Council will present a limited exhibition of Works from the Cave on April 26 and May 3, 2003, in the University’s virtual reality lab at the Technology Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Visualization. This event is being offered in conjunction with the 2003 Boston CyberArts Festival.

Dhow

Sailing a Dhow in Tanzania
Daniel Keefe’s Sailing a Dhow in Tanzania: A Cave Painting allows visitors to the virtual reality Cave to view an East African fishing boat from all sides, even from under the water.

The exhibition will feature works created within Brown’s virtual reality lab, known on campus as the Cave, located at 180 George St. Screenings will be offered from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on April 26 and May 3. Due to the size of the Cave and the interactive nature of the exhibit, advanced reservations are required.

Editors: A press preview of this exhibition will be offered on April 22. To reserve a time slot, call (401) 863-2476.

Powered by a high-performance parallel computer, the Cave is an eight-foot cubicle with high-resolution stereo graphics projected onto three walls and the floor to create a virtual reality experience. When entering the Cave, visitors are asked to remove their shoes and don special shutter glasses to synchronize the vision in their left and right eyes with alternating stereo projections on the walls. Special hardware and software keep track of the positions and movements of visitors entering the space, changing the images in a way that allows them to feel immersed in the virtual space.

Each exhibition screening will include several works. Screen, a collaborative work by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Andrew McClain, Shawn Greenlee and Joshua J. Carroll, is the story of a man who, while standing in a room full of screens, sees into the dreams of others. As the viewer reads the story, words peel off the walls at a dizzying rate and hover around him.

Daniel Keefe’s Sailing a Dhow in Tanzania: A Cave Painting depicts a boat commonly used for fishing along the coast of East Africa, as it floats in a sea of blue and green waters. Viewers will be able to walk through the water and around the dhow, viewing it from all angles and from beneath the water’s surface. The painting was created using custom software developed by Keefe with David Laidlaw, Daniel Acevedo, Tomer Moscovich, David Karelitz and Joseph LaViola.

Screen

Moving text
Screen, a collaborative work by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Andrew McClain, Shawn Greenlee and Joshua J. Carroll, has words flying off the virtual page and hovering around readers.

This Is Just a Place is an interpretation of an A. R. Ammons poem created by Vesper Stockwell, Bryant Choung, Dmitri Lemmerman, Edwin Chang and Shawn Greenlee. The work translates a poem of space, memory and mourning through images of a fluidly transforming environment, moving from night sky to forest clearing, from patterned sphere to wiggling bacteria, and from floating words to sepia-toned photographs.

Highlights from work currently under development by Joshua J. Carroll, Edwin Chang, Bryant Choung, Shawn Greenlee, Michelle Higa, Dmitri Lemmerman, Talan Memmott, Noah Norman, Vesper Stockwell and Joe Winter will also be included in the exhibition.

This is the first time the public has been invited to view works within the three-dimensional environment of the Cave; this is also the first exhibition to include Cave works that focus on the word. The use of language in the Cave is an artistic area that was almost completely unexplored until Robert Coover, adjunct professor of English and noted novelist, taught the first Cave Writing Workshop at Brown in spring 2002.

Brown University has been a pioneer in electronic writing since the 1960s, when Ted Nelson and Andries van Dam built the first hypertext system here. Since its opening in the spring of 1999 with support from IBM and the National Science Foundation, the Cave has been used by graduate and undergraduate students in chemistry, geology, cognitive and linguistic sciences, physics, archaeology, biology, computer science, applied mathematics and creative writing in a wide variety of interdisciplinary projects.

To reserve time to view Works from the Cave, call (401) 863-1362. For more information on the exhibition, contact the Bell Gallery at (401) 863-2932. For more information about the Boston CyberArts Festival, call (617) 524-8495 or visit www.bostoncyberarts.org.

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