Fluid Infinity

FLUID INFINITY
Concept: Margaret Watson
Design and Implementation: Margaret Watson
Sound: Colorado Dawn excerpt from Canyon Dreams by Tangerine Dream
Creation Period: Early 1995

Fluid Infinity is a work that was created in early 1995 as a semester project to learn C, IrisGL and the CAVE library. The project entailed converting an RT/1 animation (interpretive programming language created at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago) into C, IrisGL and CAVE code. Initially, the animation was a multi-layered abstract animation that dealt with infinitely evolving 2D space. For the CAVE, it became an artistic study in the spatiality of virtual art work in that the animation had to be adapted to effectively express the 3D space of the CAVE. This was accomplished by adding depth and enclosing the animation within a boxed room, textured with a static image of itself (image 1 below). In its virtual form, the animation became a sculptural element in which immersants could create new 2D and 3D designs through their body position and perspective within the real and/or virtual space (images 2 - 5 below).

For its one public showing, Fluid Infinity was part of a Shared Context Shell of CAVE applications presented at EVE4 in Chicago in May of 1995. The SCS was a collaborative, integrated VR world containing CAVE environments by computer science and art students in the EVL graduate program. Each artistic work within the SCS could be entered and exited via a teleport. Fluid Infinity existed in the world as an abstract box with a teleport to its side (image 6 above).