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DiMoDA 2.0 at the RISD Museum: A Review

Jason Farago of the New York Times recently published “Virtual Reality Has Arrived in the Art World. Now What?” In the piece, Farago discusses the development virtual reality technology in the art world and its cultural implications. He lists numerous exhibitions featuring virtual reality at major international institutions such as the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, The Jewish Museum in New York, the Renwick Gallery in Washington D.C., the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro, and the Robben Island Museum in Cape Town. He writes,

Virtual reality, by contrast, is a medium without limits — a medium that tries to parallel life itself. The wonder I felt when I first put on an Oculus Rift, and lost myself in Mr. Steegman Mangrané’s rain forest or Ms. Rossin’s floating world, is undeniable. Now the challenge is to put virtual reality in the service of something more complex, for it would be a pity if wonder was all we got.[1]

The RISD Museum’s latest exhibition, DiMoDA 2.0: Morphé Presence, takes on the immerging medium of virtual reality in new and challenging ways.

I enter the RISD Museum and begin navigating my way to the third floor. Take the elevator up to the sixth floor, make a left, then a right, then straight back, then take another elevator down to the third floor. The directions are confusing, but manageable. As maze-like as it may be in the midst of construction, the RISD Museum is not uncharted territory. However, when I finally arrive at the third floor, I find myself in dark and disorienting place. A small room with dark grey walls lies to my left as I exit the elevator. I enter the room to find three screens: two horizontal ones on the left wall another vertical on the back wall. The room houses little else. There are two dark wooden stools in front of the screens on the left wall. Below the screens there is a gaming console, a video game controller, and large headset hanging from the wall. On the opposite wall, there are two paragraphs of white wall text that give some context for the exhibition. Dark and intimidating as it may be, this space maintains a level of familiarity it its method of display. Despite its novel subject matter and medium, the artwork is displayed as Alfred Barr intended, an accustomed style to museum-goers worldwide.

However, the similarities to traditional museum experiences stop there. DiMoDA 2.0: Morphé Presence is otherwise in uncharted territory, alien to both viewers and curators alike. Invited curators Eileen Isagon Skyers and Helena Acosta are cognizant of this, and thus are extremely generous in the amount of information they give within the wall text. They explain what each facet of the work entails; the wall text informs participants that,

Miyö Van Stenis’s Miyö’s War Room examines how contemporary video games, social networks, and internet culture sexualize women and girls and pressure men and boys into aggressive roles. Brenna Murphy’s Vectoral~Sentience_Stack offers an optically challenging and meditative visual experience, in which the viewer seems to float in a vibrating optical illusion. Theoklitos Triantafyllidis’s humorous Self Portrait (interior) becomes a claustrophobic tour of the internal workings of the human body. Rosa Menkman’s DCT Syphoning The 64th Interval is a vibrating black and white static topography that depicts an image as it is being rendered through encoding technology. While distinctly different in their visual manifestations and conceptual aims, each of these works intertwines formal and conceptual approaches with emergent technologies, delicately balancing criticality, humor, and experimentation.[2]

Despite the curator’s generosity with information about the artwork, Morphé Presence remains an extremely challenging exhibition for participants to grasp. The novelty of the medium as well as the work’s propensity towards confusion result in an enriching, but overall inconclusive experience.

In order to engage with this artwork, participants must don a virtual reality headset and use a video game controller to move around the virtual space. The work begins with the participant standing alone on what appears to be a larger rock floating in a vast and empty outer space. The work instructs the participant to use the left joystick to walk or run across throughout the game. As you walk around the meteor, four additional meteors enter sight, one with a large geometric building with a Neoclassical facade on it, and the others, much farther away, with various indiscernible colorful objects atop them. The human tendency towards curiosity takes over, and you walk towards the building to investigate. You press the X button and leap towards the second meteor, without knowing whether you will land there. After a safe landing, you make your way towards the building and enter through the front façade’s columns. Inside, the ceiling and walls radiate with the light of stained glass. Blues, greens, and purples reflect through the windows and throughout the structure, a striking digital melding of ancient and contemporary architectural styles.

This initial stage of the work is primarily used to orient the participant to the medium. Free to walk around the meteor without obstacles, the participant can explore and take their time to get their virtual footing with the video game controller and watch the 360 degrees of this new world expand around them. The starry sky of outer space provides a striking, but easy to render, visual experience for the participant. The setting of outer space also draws a parallel to the sense of uncertainty with this new medium of virtual reality. Each exciting and liberating, but our understanding of it is still in its infancy. We have no way of knowing how vast the opportunities of outer space are, nor are we privy to the potential prospects for virtual reality technologies. We have little foundation for interacting with either scenario.

Inside the building is mostly open space with rocky outcroppings, however in the center there are four large rock or geode-like structures that glow with blue light. When approached, shimmering boulders begin loading another part of this virtual universe. Miyo, Rosa, Brenna, and Theo, the titles given to each rock, transport you to one of the far-off boulders and thus into a different world. Named after their respective artists, the different worlds have unique imageries and concepts that they address.

Although some of the worlds seem to address a similar state of confusion, others speak to more definitive topics. Perhaps a bit unexpectedly, there is not one discernable unifying concept throughout each world. As a participant, this makes Morphé Presence extremely bewildering. While moving from world to world, there is an expectation of a narrative or at least a central motif. However, this is certainly not the case and results in an intense sense of confusion and even eventual boredom. Additionally, the experience of wearing the virtual reality headset can induce mild to severe nausea, further off-putting the viewer and increasing their overall confusion and discomfort with this new medium.

The lack of a unifying theme throughout the work indicates that Morphé Presence is more of a virtual museum for a handful of artists rather than a single art object all on its own. This is reinforced in the fact that in order to leave one world and enter another, the work instructs the participant to “Go back to the lobby,” as opposed to the “main menu.” This is where the work becomes an art object instead of a video game. The work’s use of the word “lobby” implicates a formal museum setting and insists on its relationship to the physical world. In a video game, however, the “main menu” does not attempt to imply a relationship to the player’s everyday reality. The “main menu” is a digital space, while the “lobby” is a physical one.

After entering all four worlds, there is not much else to do other than take off the headset, put down the controller, exit the exhibition and recede back into normal life. Although there is no one story that the artwork follows it creates an experience of its own that cannot be easily forgotten. The experience of leaving the virtual reality is comparable only to something in between waking up from a dream, and stepping back onto Earth after being on the moon. This exhibition is without question an object of art and should be regarded as such, however it should also be considered for its experiential value.

Virtual reality is valuable not because it is a tool to escape our own reality, rather, it provides us with a basis of comparison. What is different about these various realities? What is alike? What do we want to change? What do we want to keep? And how do the answers to these questions make us feel?

Art in its highest form is an experience for the mind, the body, and the soul. DiMoDA 2.0: Morphé Presence allows the viewer to experience just that. Although the exhibition is overall more confusing than educational or inspirational, it nevertheless provides participants with an introduction to the increasingly prominent medium of virtual reality.

Sources:

[1] Farago, Jason. "Virtual Reality Has Arrived in the Art World. Now What?" New York Times, February 3, 2017, accessed February 5, 2017.

[2] Eileen Isagon Skyers and Helena Acosta, “DiMoDA 2.0: Morphé Presence” RISD Museum, January 6, 2017, accessed February 2, 2017.

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