Virtual Environments before Pixels: Yayoi Kusama's Impact on Virtual Reality

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1 DOI: Virtual Environments before Pixels: Yayoi Kusama's Impact on Virtual Reality Univ. of Torino, Computer Science Dpt Corso Svizzera 185, Torino, Italy History of art, among several subjects, is the result of the evolution of the intrinsic trends of the topic, merged with the influences of the social aspects of the present and past eras. The current historical moment is characterised by a strong process of digitalisation, and the fusion of exchange of knowledge and approaches between art and technology is growing fast. In this techart scenario, Virtual Reality is a strong example of a topic that is often considered as a result of purely technological evolution. The project AVAR (Art in Virtual and Augmented Reality) aims at giving art its credit in the definition of virtual reality experiences. We describe the art of Yayoi Kusama as an implementation of non-digital virtual environments that influence the design of experiences and the aesthetics of Virtual Reality applications. We focus on three main immersive works, in which the sense of presence, the perception of the self and of the environment, and the sense of immersion are crucial. We finally present the conclusions on how the background of the success of novel technologies can be credited to several different disciplines. Virtual Reality. Virtual environments. Immersion. Contemporary art. History of art. 3D. Yayoi Kusama. AVAR. 1. INTRODUCTION History can be represented as a compound of factors that evolve in time. Specific disciplines interact with each other and influence trends and discoveries. History of specific subjects, such as art, science, humanities, philosophy, technology, economics, cannot be analysed as isolated processes. The technological nature of the contemporary era pushes us to focus on our personal power to impact, suggesting to approach present and future with less and less consciousness about the past. We all are conscious that technology democratises and vulgarises everything, from human relationships to social interaction, to business modelling, to media production. Among all fields, Art is affected as much as other disciplines by digital progress, and technological evolution is often the subject of the creative production as well as the source of innovative tools to create new forms of art (NyTimes). In this scenario, Virtual Reality is a perfect example of a technology that supports creativity in its widest meaning. Defining Virtual Reality (VR) is a hard task that can be done starting from several different points of view: without a multidisciplinary approach, we likely lose the faculty to describe the whole phenomenon. To get in the topic, we can say that VR cannot be defined and described without using a conceptual 360 field of view. From here the need to define VR as a technique of art and not only as a technology. Beside the definition, we also give credit to artists that are precursors of VR philosophy and implementation. We give Virtual Reality a place in history of art and treat it as a proper movement. In Section 2, we introduce the project AVAR, a joint effort of researchers, artists, curators from all over the world, giving art its credit in the definition of aesthetics of virtual reality experiences. In Section 3, we describe the art of Yayoi Kusama in terms of early production of digital environments that influence the design of experiences and the aesthetics of VR applications. In Section 4, we finish the dissertation with a summary and we share our conclusions. Soccini. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. Proceedings of Proceedings of EVA London 2017, UK 410

2 2. PROJECT OVERVIEW The AVAR Project (Art in Virtual and Augmented Reality) is a research performed by a wide network of contemporary artists and technologists from the world of Academia, Industrial arts, and Independent arts. It aims at defining the advent of Virtual and Augmented Reality as a combination of the evolution of a sense of digital aesthetics in a social environment made not only of technological development, but also of an artistic and philosophical growth (Soccini 2016). The centre of the studies is in Italy -as we consider it to be a favourable location for the development of art investigations- and we are based in Torino, the tech city in the country. The tech-art team is spread around the world, and includes curators in Canberra, Australia, digital artists in Los Angeles, California, independent artists in Milan and Venice, Italy. Our team common interests are visual arts, technologies, contemporary arts, but, above all, the connections among them and the confidence in the multidisciplinary approach to the study of all these disciplines. This Japanese artist puts together the emotive intensity of the German expressionism with abstraction. Her immense and abstract paintings immediately convey the raising social sense of freedom. Her work is mainly realised using little signs: thousands of little arches of pigment meet a compact net of strokes seemingly countless in their multitude. Her work can be fully understood in an environment capable of offering a way to perceive vastity. Her work is an obsession translated in physical space, a collection of worlds made visible. These spatial representations are images of what cannot be easily figured, such as the sense of infinite, or the meaning of hallucination. She always oscillates between representation and abstraction: representation for the artist, and abstraction for the observer (Yamamura 2015). Her art satisfies users appetite for active sensorial engagement, as much as more orthodox virtual reality experiences, I feel like the Eternity, she once said. The project is at its early stages, and aims at building knowledge regarding the roots of VR in terms of evolution of the History of Art in the digital age. The output of the current phase of the project is a collection of description of the work of those contemporary artists that mostly influenced the spirit of the virtual experience. 2.1 The Yayoi Kusama Step The first step we took into history of art starts from the present and goes back to the first moment when Contemporary art, as we define it now appears. The first analysis was related to the master Lucio Fontana and his concepts of third dimension, sense of immersion, user experience. This paper presents the second analysis of the project. It is about a world famous contemporary artist, Yayoi Kusama, and her rooms. The artist develops spaces as a non-high-tech virtual reality models that can be considered as part of the background of the popularity of technologies related to digital environments and virtual worlds. 3. YAYOI KUSAMA The art of Yayoi Kusama has the roots in abstract expressionism, the movement that moved the world capital of art from Paris to New York after World War II. Figure 1: Yellow Tree furniture room. 3.1 Yellow Tree furniture room Kusama s rooms are physical structures in which human perception is challenged by visual stimuli. 411

3 The sense of body ownership is captured and flipped as the environment overcomes the viewer. To achieve this feeling, the artist uses patterns: bright colors spread in dots and twisted in living shapes create a reference projections and pixels. The artist responds to the environment and the environment responds to her. Together the artist and the artwork take distance from reality and merge into the hallucinating dimension in which the body tends to disappear. As can be seen in Figure 1, the author gives hints on how to approach the artwork: the head is the only part of the user that differentiates from the room, meaning that there is nothing beside our perception of the environment and of ourselves left of the reality we know (LookNowSeeForever). Figure 2: Dots Obsession. 3.2 Dots Obsession Dots Obsession is the name of a series of installations in which Kusama confirms her trademark: polka dots and mirrors, along, in this case, with huge amorphous inflatable objects, as seen in Figure 2. The rooms lead us to the experience that Kusama describes, implements, and lives herself. The artist is taking us to virtual non-digital environments. Lights and mirrors are the elements that create the illusion of infinite space within a confined area (Ferrell 2015), giving birth to a sense of interconnection between the man and the infinite, and annihilating all kind of gaps that prevent humans from feeling as a part of the big everything. The artist s relationship with the self and with the environment is evident in the following quote. Become one with eternity. Become part of your environment. Take off your clothes. Forget yourself. Y. Kusama 412

4 3.3 The Infinity Mirrored Room According to Kusama, the Infinity Mirrored Room, represented in Figure 3, is a liveable world. While the installation is a room covered with mirrors and tenths of coloured LED lights hanging from the ceiling in a heavenly celebration. The lights and their reflections give the sense of infinite. It is a planetary in a room, as big as a closet. The cosmic and the intimate melt together; the internal and the external space collide; science and art collaborate in creating the illusion of the perception of the impossible (Slater 2009). This installation brings the observers, or better the users, to a parallel world, and leads them through an extracorporeal artificial three-dimensional immersive experience. The first evident connections lead to famous representations of starry skies. While the 2D picture of the artwork may create a link to masterpieces like Starry Nights by Vincent Van Gogh, the live experience reminds more the involvement of the user in a VR cave representing outer space landscapes. Figure 3: Infinity Mirrored Room. 3. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS In this dissertation, we explored the connections between the evolution of art techniques and the advancement of the image-related technologies. We initially define a contemporary scenario of investigation in which the trends in History of Art are affected by digital innovation. We underline the need to consider Virtual Reality as a technique, as a tool, and as a movement. As part of the AVAR Project, we define the importance of crediting contemporary artists as precursors of VR, as they create virtual environments tout court. Yayoi Kusama is a creator of self-investigating experiences, in which sub-experiences are induced, such as immersion, expansion of the real space, sense of presence in virtual worlds. Even without the use of electronics, the artist can create virtual environments. The purposed dissertation opens a discussion on how to analyse trends in technologic evolution. We support the multidisciplinary approach, as we did and will continue doing for defining the roots of VR in contemporary art. 4. REFERENCES Ferrell, S. S. (2015) Pattern and Disorder: Anxiety and the Artwork of Yayoi Kusama. Scripps Senior Theses. Paper 554. LookNowSeeForever ( ) Yayoi Kusama: Look Now, See Forever. Queensland Government. (retrieved 10 February 2017). New York Times (2017) Virtual Reality Has Arrived in the Art World. Now What? New York Times. tual-reality-has-arrived-in-the-art-world-nowwhat.html?_r=0 (retrieved 10 February 2017). 413

5 Slater, M. (2009) Place Illusion and plausibility can lead to realistic behaviour in immersive virtual environments. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364, pp Soccini, A. M. (2016) Virtual and Augmented Reality in the Art of Lucio Fontana. In J. P. Bowen, G. Diprose, & N. Lambert (eds.), Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA 2016), London, UK. BCS, Electronic Workshops in Computing. DOI: /ewic/EVA Yamamura, M. (2015) Yayoi Kusama Inventing The Singular. The MIT Press, Boston. 414