Reception
Thursday | September 30 | 6 to 8pm
Alan Price, Professor at The Ohio State University in the Department of Design and at the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD), creates interactive virtual environments using stereoscopic displays, touchscreens, and other alternative forms of interaction and presentation.
This exhibit is a sampling of Price's work over the past five years, including installations ranging from images of the surreal to explorations of how we navigate the border between physical and artificial environments, designing simulations of both the real and the imaginary.
Biography
Alan Price is an artist creating real time responsive animation. His background as a filmmaker and animator emphasizes narrative and cinema structure in his works with immersive and interactive storytelling. Utilizing video game technology and a combination of ready-made and custom hardware, he creates virtual environments and responsive spaces to explore alternative forms of personal expression in time-based digital media. His animation and interactive work has exhibited internationally and is on permanent display in museums of art, technology, science, and history. He is currently a professor at The Ohio State University's Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD).
Statement
My interest is in the creation of new forms of interactive and virtual cinema, in which the viewer experience is informed by alternate methods of both display and user input; creating an intuitive and visceral sensation for the viewer in extending his or her reach into the space in which the story or event unfolds, and creating virtual worlds that have awareness and responsiveness to the presence of the observer. It is not about user intervention or control of the story, but it is the symbiotic relationship between the observer and the narrative event. I am interested in designing physical user interfaces that are thematically interpretive of the subject matter represented in the work, and more importantly, that allow for the viewer to feel as if physically extended into the virtual space; a sense of embodiment and immersion that dissolves the separation between the two. This is not limited to methods for engaging multiple senses or surrounding the viewer to make him or her feel physically immersed, but also to investigate ways in which actions and their familiarity, such as taking a photograph, provides a sense of playing a role and of being integral to the representation of events taking place.