Opening Reception: September 13
September 14 through January 7, 2008

Scalable Cities See all images for the press.

Virtual Unreality presents artworks that use the inherent unreal nature of these environments to create urban and suburban landscapes, undulating seascapes, and strange, never-before-seen creatures that plunge us into new worlds. The new worlds, by implication, are both inside the artwork and in our everyday world -- that is, in the ways such worlds ultimately redefine and alter our perception, understanding, expectations and interactions with our everyday world.

If you were to create your own digital environment, what would it be?

Virtual Unreality artworks and artists on exhibition include:

Life Spacies II (© 1997-99)
By Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau
Interactive Installation

Mignonneau and Sommerer’s interactive artworks have been called "epoch-making" (Toshiharu Itoh, NTT-ICC Museum, Tokyo) for developing natural and intuitive interfaces and for often applying scientific principles such as artificial life, complexity and generative systems to their innovative interface designs. Life Spacies II is an interactive, artificial-life environment that models a complex adaptive system. Users create artificial creatures by typing text messages. The text characters function as genetic code for the creature's design. Each different text creates a different creature. Depending on their construction, creatures move fast or slow. They move around and try to eat text characters. Creatures eat the same characters that make up their genetic code. Once a creature has eaten enough characters it looks for a partner creature and mates. Because their genetic code is the product of artificial evolution, children creatures look similar to their parents.

Scalable Cities (2007)
By Artist Sheldon Brown
Custom Software, Computer, Projector, User Interface

Scalable Cities explores and creates an urban/suburban/rural environment at a rapid pace. As you move along, you literally "paint" the flying landscape with highways, buildings, and automobiles. Each step in this data visualization pipeline builds upon the previous, amplifying, exaggerating, and adding on the landscape algorithmically and exponentially. This interactive virtual artwork provides equal measures of delight and foreboding, creating a vision of cultured forms that you -- the participant -- are (too) rapidly creating. While the project neither indicates nor embraces the future you build, it offers an extrapolation of its own tendencies, heightening awareness of the aesthetics and underlying logic of the game and how it determines much of our cultured existence.

Oceans (2000-2007)
By Dan Torop
Computer, Gamepad, OpenGL, C
Special Thanks: Michael Kass and Gavin Miller

Dan Torop’s artistic practice includes both the photographic and the computational. A digital simulation of the ocean has been Torop’s continuing project since 2000. He decided to create the ocean in a computer. The project is a practical experiment in the sublime. If the beauty of the waves, reflected moonrise, and stars, can be rendered by known formulae, is the experience still moving? Can technology and physics express -- rather than explain away -- the mysterious and the unknowable?

Artist Bio's
Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau are internationally-renowned media artists and researchers. They have jointly created around 20 interactive artworks, which can be found at www.interface.ufg.ac.at/christa-laurent . These artworks have been shown in around 200 exhibitions world-wide and are installed in media museums and media collections around the world, including the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Museum of Science and Industries in Tokyo, the Media Museum of the ZKM in Karlsruhe, the Cartier Foundation in Paris, the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, the NTT-ICC Museum in Tokyo, the NTT Plan-Net in Nagoya, Japan, the Shiroishi Multimedia Art Center in Shiroishi, Japan, the HOUSE-OF-SHISEIDO in Tokyo and the ITAU CULTURAL Foundation in Sao Paulo. They have worked as researchers and professors at ATR Research Labs in Kyoto Japan and at IAMAS in Ogaki Japan for 10 years and are currently heading the department for Interface Cultures at the University of Art and Design in Linz Austria which specializes on interactive art, interactive media and interface design. They have won mayor international media awards, among others the "Golden Nica" Prix Ars Electronica Award for Interactive Art 1994 (Linz, Austria).

Sheldon Brown is Director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) where he is a Professor of Visual Arts and the head of New Media Arts for the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technologies (Calit2).

His work examines the relationships between technology-mediated and physical experiences. As an artist, he is concerned about overlapping and reconfiguring private and public spaces; how new forms of technological mediation are proliferating and co-exist as equally “public” realms with geographies and social organizations that are becoming ever more diverse. His work allows glimpses into the formative structures of these new public realms and provides a view that suggests new modes of being. This work often exists across a range of public realms. An example of this include projects such as "In the Event" at the Key arena in Seattle where 9 computers choreograph multiple video streams across 28 monitors in a real-time constructive engagement with the spectator's act of envisioning the events of the arena.

Scalable Cities made with assistance from: Alex Dragulescu, Erik Hill, Mike Caloud, Joey Hammer, Carl Burton, Daniel Tracy. With Support from: High Moon Studio's, Intel, IBM, Sun, The Center for Research in Computing and the Arts and Calit2 at UCSD.

Video: www.sheldon-brown.net/scalable/moca.html

Dan Torop
Torop’s images have been seen in five solo shows in New York since 1999; as a digital artist, he works with physics- and mathematics-based models which contain inherent beauty. He has curated several shows, including A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts (co-curated with Justine Kurland), which postulated an inversion of the modernist vision of photo-history. Other computational endeavors include a machine that endlessly speaks heartfelt poetry, animated puppets that dance to music (in collaboration with Ze Frank), and the machinima film LoveDeath (in collaboration with David Kaplan and Paul Marino). Torop has contributed articles to Modern Painters and North Drive Press, and has twice been a visiting artist at Columbia University School of the Arts. He holds an A.B. from Harvard College and an M.F.A. from Yale University. Torop lives in Brooklyn.

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