4D VR Mediascape [work-in-progress]
Imagine time as a material axis, a spatial lens outside our three dimensions that makes changes to Earth’s atmosphere visible. Ice cores drilled from glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica provide this material timeline, a fourth dimension reaching 800,000 years back into the history of Earth's climate. Glaciers are deep-time tesseracts, containers of environmental time. TesserIce creates a 4D experience of navigable space-time in VR, placing the participant within a life-size, traversable, virtual tesseract in which space, time, gravity, and sound behave according to the unfamiliar physics of the fourth dimension. They are free to walk through ice walls, floors, ceilings, and time in four dimensions, propelling them through unfolding hyper-dimensional vistas, sounds, juxtapositions, and timeframes. The TesserIce experience is of the fourth dimension from within.
TesserIce fosters a new relationship between the space-time of the human and of the glacial. Using a subversive treatment of scale – both temporal and spatial scales – compels participants to simultaneously imagine the microscopic, our own human scale, and the scale of the planetary. The work invites us to reconsider our radical connection to time, geology, and Earth. It is an entry point for reflecting on natural systems and processes, drawing our attention to remote ecosystems affected by the climate crisis we have created.
TesserIce - Image Clea T. Waite 2022
TesserIce - Image Clea T. Waite 2022
TesserIce - Image Clea T. Waite 2022
TesserIce - Image Clea T. Waite 2022
TesserIce - Image Jared Christopher Kelley 2021
