Interactive Multiuser Immersive Multimedia Environment by Tim Gruchy

Commisioned for 2nd Asian Art Biennial, Taichung

Clesthyra is a fictional mythological character from Neil Stephenson’s Anathem, who can see in all directions at once. This works breaks down and subverts that possibility. It subtly draws the audience’s attention within the 360º screen space, playing with the shifting boundaries between disambiguity and ambiguity. The work moves its audience.

At the same time it monitors the audience within the space and how they move proximate to the screen, deriving complex control information, which in turn is fed back to control the screen and sound spatial behaviours and content juxtapositions.

The sound design by Tim and James Pinker is intended to work in two ways, firstly in bringing and reinforcing a sense of meaning and enhanced emotional resonance to the different phases of the content; and secondly as a strong spatial indicator of the two-way relationship between viewer and screen.

The content traverses three domains from which Gruchy seeks to explore how we bring meaning to what we see. Nature and landscape can portray our idealised view our home earth. The urban environment is now the context and reality of life for most people on the planet. Cultural space is possibly what we experience most differently throughout the world. What we see, the value we give it, and what meaning we derive from it, vary dramatically, being entirely dependent on our point of view.