Sidney Fels
Ashley Gadd
To Swim across the Pacific in an airplane, Misheff will be suspended by wires and springs in a cage so that he can swim, float and paint and play with his favourite musical instrument, the Lightning II. By swimming inside the airplane he creates a “container” out of the airplane. The airplane travels nearly the same rotational speed of the earth, suspending time, making another “container” or “bubble” of un-reality. The cage itself is a container and the audience can see his "un-real" world that he is swimming in and become part of it. A performance will unfold around him that takes advantage of this un-reality containter created by Misheff and the airplane.
Since there will be no time in this unreal container
travelling with the sun we can suspend, amplify or attenuate our philosophy,
morality and egos. Reality and virtuality will fuse.Swimming Across
the Pacific is a piece about cooperation but art is inherenly undemocratic.
In this non-stop capsule in limbo we can explore artistic cooperation with
impunity.
Technical description (see diagram below):
The swimming apparatus consists of a harness and 250cm
X 250cm X 250cm rig and a virtual ocean in which to swim. The harness
supports the swimmer in position to do either front crawl, breaststroke,
or butterfly, with free arms and supported legs. The leg support
provides a counter-weighted pulley system to allow the swimmer to kick
while still keeping him or her "afloat". A six degree of freedom
tracking system is used to determine the swimmer's arm and leg positions,
which are correlated to the graphical display.The swimmer's arms are free
to move to play music as well.
The swimmer swims through a virtual reality, graphical ocean, displayed both on a head-mounted display (HMD) for the swimmer and on a large projection screen for the audience. There are auxillary HMDs for audience members to join the swimmer in his virtual un-reality. The ocean shows the west and east coasts of the Pacific and the swimmer's virtual position between them. Fish, waves, and clouds make up the swimmer's immediate environment; these are seen from the first-person perspective on the HMDs. Meanwhile, an avatar is displayed swimming on the large screen. The avatar moves its arms and legs in time with the swimmer, and provides a perspective for the audience as it moves through the ocean.
Pictures and Video of the Virtual Swimming Cage
Video footage inside the virtual swimming cage (7.7Mbytes)
