Thursday, September 02, 1999
Sculpture takes viewers online
Virtual exhibit a global link
BY OWEN FINDSEN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Virtual sculpture exists in virtual reality, which means it doesn't really exist at all. You can see it, but you can't touch it, and you only can see it on a computer screen.
Sculpture for a Virtual World, the first-ever virtual sculpture exhibition, opens Saturday at the Contemporary Arts Center. But you don't have to go there to see it, not all of it anyway. Just sign on to your PC at home.
“It's like stepping into a landscape,” says University of Cincinnati professor of sculpture Derrick Woodham, organizer of the exhibition. “You enter through a Web browser and view the sculpture installations in seamless space.”
Sculpture today has gone high tech. Many contemporary sculptors design their art on computers and share them on the Internet.
The CAC is participating in “Intersculpt '99,” a kind of on-line conference that brings artists and art together from Paris; Manchester, England; Tempe, Ariz.; and Hong Kong.
The CAC will display photos and models of computer designed sculpture and provide two computer terminals where visitors can roam through a digital sculpture garden.
A computer generated figure called an avatar represents you on the screen.
“You can see other people who are in the garden, even if they're in another country,” Mr. Woodham says. “You can have conversations with them using the keyboard.”
All this doesn't mean that real, solid sculpture is fading away. One of the purposes of the exhibition is to demonstrate how solid, three dimensional “prints” can be made.
“There are extrusion machines, milling machines, all varieties of machines that can make hard copies of three dimensional images,” Mr. Woodham says.
“The technology is used in industry to produce prototypes, but the companies like to work with artists because artists come up with more challenging problems.”
The main event of the CAC exhibition will happen from Oct. 1-9, when the international Intersculpt '99 competition takes place. There will be special programs and demonstrations and models of the three winning sculptures will be made at the CAC. You can even have a three-dimensional laser scan of your body sent to Paris.
If you want to stroll the virtual sculpture garden at home, you'll need a PC with a processor of 133 MHz or better, Windows 95, 98 or NT, 16 megs RAM (32 megs recommended), 50 megs of hard drive space. Macintosh users need a PC emulation program such as Virtual PC, OS 8.0, G3 or iMac recommended.
Go to www.activeworlds.com and download the free software for Active Worlds, which you use as a browser instead of Netscape or Explorer. There are more than 500 “worlds” to explore. Find the “DAAP” world and turn left to enter the digital sculpture garden.
IF YOU GO
• What: Sculpture for a Virtual World
• When: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Saturday, noon-5 p.m. Sunday. Admission Saturday through Nov. 7. Intersculpt '99, Oct. 1-9
• Where: Contemporary Arts Center, 115 E. Fifth St., downtown
• Admission: $3.50 general, $2 students and senior citizens. Free on Monday
• Information: 721-0390
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