Traces is an immersive art project which uses the CAVE stereoimmersive environment for an unorthodox purpose. While most virtual worlds are based on a paradigm of virtual navigation through texture mapped worlds, Traces has no “world" and no navigation. The aesthetic/theoretical goal of Traces is to focus the attention of the user onto their [sic] own sense of embodiment through time. The bodily behavior of the user generates real-time graphics and sound. The technical goal of Traces is wireless full-body interaction without the use of standard trackers, joysticks and wands, and without icons, menus or graphical pointers of any kind.º
With this nod to Krueger's legacy of “unencumbered VR," Penny forthrightly announces his well-nigh philosophical (indeed properly phenomenological) commitment to constructing virtual reality on the basis of our evolutionarily acquired power of embodiment.
This commitment imposes several constraints that form the very strengths of his project. First, he must eschew the use of illusionist tricks and software tools built according to the simulation paradigm: “Unlike other VR projects, I have no interest here in illusionistic texture mapped models, the illusion of infinite virtual space or building virtual worlds.' All attention is focused on the ongoing behavior of the user."1o Second, he must forego the illusion of proximity in his realization of a telematic, networked experience; unlike the work of Paul Sermon (which achieves telematic copresence through the superposition of video images of participants' bodies), Traces emphasizes “the highly technologically mediated nature of the communication. The users never see each other, only the results of each other's behavior. The user interacts with gossamer spatial traces which exhibit the dynamics and volumes of bodies...." (Penny). Finally, and perhaps most consequentially, Penny must move away from the default perspectival interface of VR environments, the reduction of the user's body to a "single point, a viewpoint, or the end of a "pointer," which, he notes, "effectively erases the body from the computational system":
My goal is to build a system with which the user can communicate kinesthetically, where the system comes closer to the native sensibilities of the human, rather than the human being required to adopt a system of abstracted and conventionalized signals (buttons, mouse clicks, command line interface ...) in order to input data to the system. (Penny)
BODIES IN CODE
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