The worlds themselves were unmemorable, unimportant. The entire time I was singly conscious of the gloves, the weight of the goggles, footsteps, the conversation of people around me, the fabric of the screens, the darkness of the space.. perhaps over time these would be less noticeable, but this edge between the virtual and real was interesting, a consciousness of the ‘other’, which it seems most virtual worlders try to erase.

The installation then, is an expression of the workshops, where we try to create a set of dynamic codes that correspond to an experience of place. These installations can be formal – in a museum of gallery setting as at Incheon, or can be informal, spontaneous events that take place on an outside wall or other non-standard place.

see workshops

see installation at the Incheon Digital Art Festival

My father was born on a farm near Dubno in the Ukraine, which before the 2nd World War was part of Poland. In 1939, when he was a teen, the entire family, together with thousands of other Poles, were taken by the Russian army to Siberia. Late in life he decided to visit the land where he had been born and raised.

My grandfather’s farm was considered hi-tech. The farm had a large orchard, and he installed an underground cooled cellar. This enabled them to keep fruit throughout the year and sell ‘fresh’ apples in the spring and early summer.

Arriving from the local airport by taxi, my father traveled along the local road, acutely remembering the topography and details in the landscape. Finally he arrived at the hill and fields that used to be his childhood home. Everything had been erased! All the trees had gone, the fields had been merged and now there was nothing but a gently rising giant field. Astonished, he walked onto the earth.

From a distance, a figure walked towards him. Gradually he could make out a man, not much younger than himself. Speaking Russian, my father introduced himself, asking the man about his former home, if he had made some great mistake. “No no”, the man replied, he himself had lived in the same house with the large orchard and cold cellar, and for decades they had an easy life of it, picking fruit and selling it into the next year.

The farm was sold to another local farmer, and when Glasnost occurred and Ukraine became independant, the new owner was so worried that the former residents might take back the farm that they had demolished everything, the farmhouse, the trees, the cellars. Any and all details of the former place had been erased forever.

We took a nice hike today … walked up through a redwood grove to the top of a small hill and sat on a bench with a really nice view.

In sharing this with some friends, people have mentioned an allusion to Be Here Now by Ram Das, which is a sort of New Age book about spirituality and meditation from the 70′s. We are ok with this. An important point of the book is an emphasis on living in the present moment. These ideas are not unrelated to those we are attempting to address with this project. In fact, even the word “avatar” is an English interpretation of a Sanskrit word meaning literally “descent”, but usually implying “a deliberate descent from higher spiritual realms to lower realms of existence for special purposes” [wikipedia].