Symposium

DomeWorks: Perception, Reflection, and Projection in the Dome of Consciousness
Diana Reed Slattery
Rensaller Polytechnic Institute
http://www.academy.rpi.edu/glide/

Summary
DomeWorks is an arts collaborative involving multiple visual and sound artist/technologists creating and performing experimental media works for domed or dome-like spaces. We are building hardware and software tools for technological, scientific, educational and aesthetic experimentation in wraparound realities. The presentation describes how the artists are approaching the science of consciousness from a performative perspective, and closes with suggestions for artistic-scientific collaborations.

Domeworks explores extended and re-organized perception in a variety of ways. The Dome creates a physical space of performance that loosens the forward fixation of gaze onto small or large flat framed rectangles, as in TV, movies, or the computer screen, spreading both sound and sight throughout a 360_ immersive, edgeless surround. Dome performance seeks to extend the dimensionality of sight and sound through spatialization, to the edges of and beyond peripheral vision, exploring the borders of audibility and visibility, opacity and transparency, and the protean shapes and qualities of attention that construct aesthetic experience.

Domeworks’ metaphoric underpinnings resonate from the archaic past of our first sacred spaces—the starry dome of the night sky, the caves we sheltered in, painted our totem animals and deities in —and forward into an imagined future of zero gravity space stations and alien holodecks where one can navigate a 3D dataspace. The intensity of these multiple metaphors coupled with the known attractions of immersion on multiple sensory channels creates a magical environment for art events.

Biography

Diana Slattery is the Director of DomeWorks. Her current artistic practice, The Glide Project, is informed by her Ph.D. research in visual language and altered states of consciousness. The Glide Project (http://www.academy.rpi.edu/glide) spirals around a central theme of the mutual evolution of language, game, and consciousness, describing and modeling one possibility for an evolutionary writing system. Glide emerged from Slattery’s novel, The Maze Game. LiveGlide is the three-dimensional form of Glide which is performed as a writing instrument in real-time, on flat-screen or in the Dome.