Rachel Rossin, The Sky Is a Gap, 2017, mixed media with VR video (color, sound, indefinite duration).
RACHEL ROSSIN
MY WORKS in virtual reality are often crudely sentient—they have an awareness of the viewer. Most recently, I have created installations that interpolate the audience’s passage through the gallery into the VR environment’s timescale; the behavior, physics, and light of both physical and virtual spaces are enmeshed. In Sky Is a Gap, 2017, the scene is a slowly intensifying disaster—a Zabriskie Point–like explosion of a building. Yet the event progresses only in accordance with the viewer’s physical location: Her movements through space, tracked by motion sensors, “scrub” the sequence, causing it to unfold at normal speed, sped up, or in reverse. The viewer drives the disaster with her body. Time, here, happens in 3-D.