The extensive reference to source materials and interviews bring the story of its impacts up to date through the critical reflections of the early pioneers. Using the most culturally significant machinima works (machine-cinema) as lenses to trace its history and impacts, ‘Pioneers in Machinima: The Grassroots of Virtual Production’ provides in-depth testimony by filmmakers and others involved in its emergence.
Its latest transformation is evident through the increasing convergence of games and film where real-time virtual production as a professional creative practice is resulting in new forms of machine-generated interactive experiences. Machinima is the first digital cultural practice to have emerged from the internet into a mainstream creative genre. Machinima’s impacts are identified by the community, supplemented by Harwood and Grussi’s research and experience over a period of 25 years – from game, film and filmmaking to digital arts practice, creative technologies developments and related research and theory.
This important new work focuses on the pioneers in machinima, considered to be the grassroots and beginnings of virtual production. This original study provides us with an important exposition of two of Char Davies' acclaimed projects and an exploration of the future impact of digital virtual art on our worldviews. Char Davies' Immersive Virtual Art and the Essence of Spatiality explores spatiality through a broad scope of disciplines, including philosophy, mythology, biology, and visual studies, in order to familiarize the reader with virtual reality art - how it differs from traditional artistic media and why immersive virtual art promises to expand our imaginative horizons. By donning a head-mounted display unit and a body vest to monitor breathing and balance, participants are immersed in 3D-virtual space where they interact with abstract images of nature while manoeuvring in an artificial spatial environment. Davies, originally a painter, turned to technology in an effort to create the effect of osmosis between self and world.
In this first book-length study of the internationally renowned Canadian artist Char Davies, Laurie McRobert examines the digital installations Osmose and Ephémère in the context of Davies' artistic and conceptual inspirations.