Char Davies

Char Davies (born 1954) is a Canadian contemporary artist known for creating immersive virtual reality (VR) artworks. A founding director of Softimage, Co, she is considered a world leader in the field of virtual reality and a pioneer of bio-feedback VR.

Life and Early Work

Davies was born in Toronto, Canada. She studied liberal arts at Bennington College in Vermont, focusing on philosophy, religion, anthropology and biology for three years from 1973 to 1975. She transferred to the University of Victoria (UVic) and received the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1978. After leaving UVic, she made a living for a while painting portraits of loggers and trees on Vancouver Island. The experience of watching the loggers, who mostly enjoyed nature, destroy things they loved had a profound influence on her own later work.

Since Davies was originally a painter, her early forays into virtual art were characterized by a "painterly style." Her own style developed her own created symbolic language and sense of aesthetics. As early as the 1980s, Davies was looking into computer technology and 3D virtual spaces. In 1983, she was inspired by computer animation work created by Daniel Langlois and felt that computer art might help her capture images that could go beyond painting.