Virtual Reality and Art
Virtual reality (VR) isn’t just a new bit of tech, it’s a new medium, a new method of message composition and delivery, and a new mode of expression.
As VR headsets hit the market this year, artists quickly started finding ways to use them:
When I first read about the Tilt Brush and the artistic possibilities presented by VR I thought it was a little gimmicky, but that initial hesitation to fully consider it was an impulse born of fear. Art, if nothing else, is a distillation of the human experience. Creative expression, and the construction of things that serve no industrial purpose, works that aim only to reveal the hidden and murky vulnerabilities of the human condition is humanity at it’s most basic, and in a sense, tender level. If our technology is the species at its industrial best, than surely art is how we approach our emotional zenith. It was a love of art and humanity that made me reluctant to consider the artistic implications of VR because in my mind I wanted there to be at least some line between our technological advancement and our artists’ expression. I now consider that opinion to be a bit of an over-think.
VR is extremely cool, and when you start to consider the artistic possibilities it becomes all the more compelling. VR is one of the first truly new artistic mediums. We’ve had poetry, song, and dance for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. From cave-paintings to canvases hanging in the Louvre, painting itself has evolved tremendously, but the medium — ie putting pigments on a surface in an ordered pattern to create a scene or tell a story — is fundamentally the same. For most other artistic mediums I believe the story is similar. Virtual reality, however, seems less an evolution of medium but the creation of an entirely new way of creating and most importantly, experiencing art.
My favorite part of the Tilt Brush video above is when American artist Tristan Eaton says,
“To be able to take a brush stroke, and whip it over your head…and then whip another one around it is amazing.”
I like that moment both for the message and because his enthusiasm is so obvious.
So artists in VR can essentially create 3D, immersive paintings, they can simultaneously sculpt and paint and draw all at once. The color pallets available to them are beyond anything that can be purchased at an art store, and one has to believe that the degree to which an artist can customize his work is entirely without precedent.
VR also represents an enormous amount of money-saved to an artist, and correspondingly lowers the barrier of entry for the artistically ambitious mind. Sure, the HTC Vive is $800 (the Tilt Brush application is $30), but the price will surely go down eventually, and more to the point: an artist is now capable of creating massive, immersive installations, entire galleries dedicated to a single visual narrative or project, they can create landscapes that an audience literally must walk through, and they can do it all for less than a thousand dollars. A thousand dollars is a lot of money, don’t get me wrong, but when what you’re getting in return is the impossible, it seems reasonable.
I, for one, cannot wait to experience some of these VR art installations. At one point in the above video, the camera pushes through a part of the painting. It is literally moving through the pigment. The realization that I could at some point in the near future stand back and observe a piece of art, the same way I’ve done thousands of times before, but then actually do something I’ve always fantasized about doing and walk into the painting is just so unequivocally dope that all I can do is shake my head in disbelief.
So, what does VR mean for art? The honest answer is I don’t know, and no one will for another couple years, but what I do know is that it’s cool, very very cool.
