Empyrean
Description
Empyrean is a VRML online installation that generates a virtual geography that self-consciously works within and disrupts protocols of code. Described by the artist as soft skinned e-scape, the user navigates seven connected zones sensually, through floating images, movement and sound to traverse the work/worlds. Sound and image and user exploration are closely integrated and responsive, creating an early example of affectually immersive online poetics. Sound design: Mitchell Whitelaw.
Gillian Fuller.
Gillian Fuller.
Artist Statement
Empyrean is a soft space constructed on the internet in Virtual Reality Modeling Language, a parallel universe to the hard spaces we inhabit each day. It contains seven intertwined e-scapes, - order, truth, beauty, strangeness, charm, chaos, and void. These zones are realms of the spirit, arenas beyond space and time which are simultaneously contained within the screen, just as the medieval empyrean of Christianity was the containing sphere or outer limit of the universe, the arena where god and the angels where thought to live.
The work is an investigation of the colonization of the virtual - confronting the re-creation of urban spaces and the pioneering metaphor that has infested the web as users try to remake online virtual space as a poor imitation of the real. It is a space with no attachments to offline reality, a place of emptiness - of hungry voids, of gaps and environment, which has no horizon line to anchor oneself against, and no attachment to offline hard space. Empyrean deliberately does not provide pathways to follow so that the viewer must transverse the otherworldly yet oddly familiar domains thru their senses, by feeling one's way thru this immersive environment with its in-tensions and strange attractions.
Source of Artist Statement
Empyrean is a soft space constructed on the internet in Virtual Reality Modeling Language, a parallel universe to the hard spaces we inhabit each day. It contains seven intertwined e-scapes, - order, truth, beauty, strangeness, charm, chaos, and void. These zones are realms of the spirit, arenas beyond space and time which are simultaneously contained within the screen, just as the medieval empyrean of Christianity was the containing sphere or outer limit of the universe, the arena where god and the angels where thought to live.
The work is an investigation of the colonization of the virtual - confronting the re-creation of urban spaces and the pioneering metaphor that has infested the web as users try to remake online virtual space as a poor imitation of the real. It is a space with no attachments to offline reality, a place of emptiness - of hungry voids, of gaps and environment, which has no horizon line to anchor oneself against, and no attachment to offline hard space. Empyrean deliberately does not provide pathways to follow so that the viewer must transverse the otherworldly yet oddly familiar domains thru their senses, by feeling one's way thru this immersive environment with its in-tensions and strange attractions.
Source of Artist Statement
Creator
Rackham, Melinda
Date
2000-2003
Contributor
Whitelaw, Mitchell
Rights
Copyright Melinda Rackham. The copyright of images posted on the ADELTA Website belongs to third parties and is included on this website by permission from copyright holders. Apart from any use permitted by the Copyright Act 1968 (including fair dealing) the images may not be downloaded, adapted, remixed, printed, emailed, stored in a cache or otherwise reproduced without the written permission from the copyright holder.
Genre
3D Virtual environment
Work URL
Citation
Rackham, Melinda, “Empyrean,” ADELTA, accessed May 2, 2024, http://adelta.westernsydney.edu.au/items/show/165.