Interactive Virtual Environment Installation, 1995
By Kathleen Ruíz
Techno Seduction
In The Lost Dimension I am considering the places we go when we daydream and where a person with epilepsy goes during a seizure. Those skips in perception to the other side of consciousness - the indistinct edge of actuality and the imaginary. This space, defined by surprise and unpredictable frequencies, concerns itself with the suspension of the real - a departure from duration, or as Dostoevski, who was himself an epileptic, states, to know what it is for time to cease.
Through direct real time interaction in a projected digital spatial composition, the participant can enter three distinct worlds: a cloud like structure where everything is dis-embodied, a type of city where gravity is lost as if in the throws of a seizure, and finally a place inside a barrier where we are in an in-between, but protected land. Within each of these passages are objects which contain other objects or movies which are mapped onto their surfaces. These symbolic juxtapositions and the loss of scale and objective boundaries impart new meanings to ordinary articles and abstract shapes.
In The Lost Dimension there is clearly the chance that inside-out, upside down and backwards are viable modes of experiencing and penetrating symbolic space. Perhaps we can learn what it may be like to widen our perceptions and to experience a maze in which we become lost, and then find ourselves in the confusion.