I use Virtual Reality and other digital mediums as a means of exploring the physical. I create installations which allow the viewer to better experience the ambiguous area between virtual spaces and physical places. In 30+ Peoples Drawings in a Space, I invite participants to draw invisible lines in the air with a motion tracked tool, filling the virtual space around them with digital doodles while leaving the physical room empty. I am interested in where the lines between digital and physical worlds collapse. In The Space Behind a Mirror, I force 3D scanning technology to explore the impossible space behind an infinity mirror and make it real via 3D printing.
I explore how digital tools think, or don’t think. A digital camera is designed to remove as much noise from an image as possible, but it doesn’t know the difference between digital noise and distant stars. I disable and circumvent the noise reduction feature of the camera to take photographs of the sky at night, looking past the image and focusing on the noise. I seek to use fantastical technology to present the mundane, and mundane objects to allow entry to fantastical worlds. In Studio Space, a virtual reality headset displays an exact copy of the room it is contained in, and in The Underside of a Shoe a discarded shoe serves as the landscape for a miniature world.
I believe virtual realities are just as real as physical realities, they are both experienced and constrained by our senses. Whether or not a reality can be touched has no bearing on how it makes us feel. I believe that virtual realities are not only those presented through a headset or on a screen, but those we construct for ourselves as we perceive the world around us.