Created by Jeffrey Shaw with Agnes Hegedues and Bernd Lintermann.

ConFIGURING the CAVE is a computer based interactive video installation that assumes a set of technical and pictorial procedures to identify various paradigmatic conjunctions of body and space. The work utilises the CAVE technology stereographic virtual reality environment with contiguous projections on three walls and the floor. The user interface is a near life-size wooden puppet that is formed like the prosaic artists’ mannequin; this figure can be handled by the viewers to control real time transformations of the computer generated imagery and the sound composition.

ConFIGURING the CAVE is constituted by seven differentiated pictorial domains. Movement of the puppets body and limbs dynamically modulate various parameters in the image and sound generating software, while particular postures of the puppet cause specific visual events to occur. Most significantly it is the action of moving the puppet’s hands to cover and then uncover its eyes, which causes the transitions from one pictorial domain to the next.

ConFIGURING the CAVE embodies a meta-language of functional relationships between corporeal and spatial co-ordinates. These relationships are both physical and conceptual, reflecting the traditional attitude in many cultures of conjecturing the body as the locus and measure of all things. At the same time it puts that tradition in a post-modern exigency which exposes the fragile covariance of a representative surrogate body now located in a measureless space of reticular forms.