Do paintings bite?

oui, comme le
mawpire, bon titre!
Carlos Franklin, Taipeï, 2018

With the title of the book by Leon Golub’s, I want to start my talk saying how much white
cubes are intimidating spaces, producing a feeling of lack of knowledge to the
public, that increases while approaching to contemporary expressions. Museums and galleries
have got such an aura, as Walter Benjamin said, that people go to the place but they do not
necessarily coexist with artworks.

Nowadays, multiple stimuli interrupt also, like crowds in museums, the need of information
held in devices such as audio-guides, being part of tourist guide groups (I don’t include here
curator’s talks or special visits), not mentioning the constant use of mobile phones oui!!! and
tablets to communicate with people outside the venue (especially young public). People’s
attention is somewhere else but in paintings. So (iIn order to prevent the continual
disturbance) we need to create a place to provoke those encounters, offering a new dimension
to the prosumer (producer and consumer of content) and bringing something unseen or
surprising using new technologies.

We need to show creations in contexts other than museum or galleries. We don’t need to re-
create that feeling of intimidation in VR, maybe we can find places that existed once
or somewhere we cannot have accessthat are far away geographically nor imagined from
us(revoir cette phrase). A space other than white cubes allows the user to get to know new
knowledge “information” (je mettrais “mental/cognitive space”, il ne s’agit pas de procurer
des informations) about the work: In my case, being part of one of artist’s hallucinations
while breaking down the architecture of a triptych (Bosch); visiting a castle -the Alcázar- that
disappeared centuries ago (Velázquez), or getting into a space that explains the political
power of a society through its architecture (Veronese).
Creating the moment
The strongest moment in VR is transforming paintings into volumes to invite the users to
trespas(sing)traverse the canvas. A kind of Alice going through and behind the mirror. It
iIs in thatis/that instant that when people can inhabit a painting, and it marks the moment
for them to experience it instead of looking at it. Experiencing breaks the aura (W. Benjamin)
and allows to look with perspective, not through fragments. A neuro cognitive and
proprioceptive approach totally different to the additive way we learn in occidental cultures.

VR helps dismantling the verticality of artworks, as well as the invisible historical and social
power of Institutions. In VR we don't look at a painting in the context of a trip to Paris to see
the Louvre, simply we are in the space of representation. VR helps us to understand that we
live in a world of symbols, cultural distinctions that were given meanings and that assembled?
– il manque de CODput together, they write what we call History (with capital H).

Creating experiences about art allows us to see in the way people used to see, to understand,
within the artwork, interpretations behind objects and decors. VR teaches us the meaning of
seeing, through three elements, the point of view, the cognitive space and the built of
presence.

Symbolically and physically we get into artworks, and differently from a museum visit where
we can get distracted with any object outside a painting, VR let us to get lost in the details, to
become part of the scene (space, time and history), while re-enacting the painting itself.
That’s why I wanted to continue my work with paintings, the one I have been doing for tv
during the last four years, discovering VR as new medium.
Je mettrais une liaision plus explicite entre ce qui précède et ce qui suit.

After presenting the experiences publicly, audience enjoyed time traveling and relating
differently to characters or elements in paintings. The three experiences I made, that opened
the way to new VR-makers in France to continue this work, have a voice off : the artist tells
what he had in his mind while executing the artwork. The feeling of being in someone's mind
creates empathy, the artwork gets humanity/becomes more human/feels human and ideas are
transmitted through feelings, /and multiple sensorial sensations, as well as intellectual
stimuli. VR empowers people (in what way? à développer) and the to appreciate ion of
paintings.

VR and representation
VR makes us live and believe in representation, which doesn't replace the world, but it's a
world by itself. Representation was considered less than ideas and physical objects for eons,
but this distinction changed in 17th century. Representation, as well as image and
reflexion marked the appearance of subjective vision. Subjectivity, in this case, is not a
passive but an active wayapproach/means to perceive the existing (physical) reality.
Representation, image and reflexion create signs (the index for Susan Sontag), that are not
consequences of physical objects. Signs create effects of reality on the subject, in our case the
user of VR experiences. We create effects on the public that affect it? /that is affected by it?.

According tTo Ernest. Gombrich, paintings were perceived in three different ways during
history, and we may also see them in the short history of VR. Until middle age, icons
represented a separation from the world. Later, representation was compared to a map, signs
giving selective information about physical world. Last, but not least, it was compared to a
mirror, giving the appearance of what the world looks like. This, introduces the concept of
likelihood (vraisemressemblance in French, vesimilar illusiveness): the way things have to be
represented in order, to be understood and well received.

Paintings in VR are not understood/are not meant to be understood intellectually/exclusively

by means of human rationality – je le mettrais comme cela car on ne peut jamais faire
abstraction complète de la raison, c’est impossible! but, instead, contemplated biologically
and emotionally, its likelihood. The body will accept the illusion of real in the way world,
customs or behavior have toshould be ??? (ils doivent?, ca implique – en tout cas pour moi -
une connotation morale et je ne crois pas que tu veuilles dire ca) for us.

The specificity of CGI in VR problematizes representation when digital adds to our speech
simulation and simulacra elements. Gombrich said that when we put a candle in front of a
mirror, we see the image alike to reality, but we don't notice at first sight that the light of the
real candle will increase thanks to its reflection. However this mirror is still in this binary
logic of sign and signification. Continuing talking about mirrors, we have the fictional
character of vampire, an entity that cannot have a reflexion. To Joan Fontcuberta (Spanish
photographer and author), image can be the inverted conception of the vampire: a reflexion
without a referent (oui, autre exemple célèbre:like “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” deby Magritte in
painting). In CGI based VR experiences, we create worlds without references to the physical
one, an advantage to create new rules that to rule it.

The cultural value of framing

Framing has been an exercise in arts that delimits what to see and impose how to see it, like
political and historical discourses on societies. Painting, drawing, then photography and film,
created the standards of framed vision. Frames are proofs of cultural field of vision. VR make
us being aware of the cultural value of framing braking the canvas and transforming a square
or rectangle into a sphere, allowing us to see what we couldn't have seen before. Paintings are
re-invented because of this unseen part.

Unframing made the same thing that modern art did to sculpture : it took away the stand (of a
sculpture) and subscribed the artwork to the “common” life level. In our case VR took
away/made disappear (afin d’éviter la répétition de mots) the frame (therefore the fragmented
vision), and gave us back our natural sense of sight.

So what is a close up, or a bird's eye view, or an American shot, a first shot, a long shot? They
don't exist anymore and open a place to perspective. There are no more framing values
but views or distance values.

Perspective has been an evolution of thoughts and a proof of the accuracy acquired in optical
perception. Perspective is a mathematical expression and a comparative optical system, a
relationship between objects. In VR perspective creates the narrative: we advance in the story
when we can change our attention from the closest to farther ones, or looking to our unseen or
blind sides. Sound spacialisation helps increasing this notion of depth, changing our point of
attention.

Composition was once the interpretation of eye movements all over the image given by the
tension of elements. In VR composition becomes emplacements of the viewer in 3-axis space
and time. The drawn lines on bi-dimensional surfaces are replaced by cartographies showing
events that catch our attention on x and z axis, the place of actions.

VR is about physical presence in a created place. We can have a body or not, we can have a
performance moving our body in the space (vive, rift, acer versions) or (to have) a 360° field
of vision, while following an already set camera. In “Las Meninas” I tried to use another body
and to change it each time we jumped from one character to another during the storytelling. I
had to stay with the camera over the shoulder to create more presence and less confusion
because ofthe (ou ajouter un verbe plus loin dans la phrase) the transitions between characters
and their different size of bodies, perturbeding the perception of proportions.
The importance of presence is because it activates what it’s known as cognitive space, or the
way we put and perceive information in space, process called categorization of ideas,
memories and thoughts. The distances and dimensions vary depending on information type,
people’s awareness and their original culture. Cognitive space will make us understand our
connection to space, scale, distances, events and actors. This has been crucial to rebuild
paintings and to make people inhabit them. Representation and perspective have changed
during time and it’s important to keep them like they were at the time, or to change them,
whether we chooseice to conserve the historical align or just to explain the multiple levels of
information that a painting has (like revealing secrets) with a contemporary vision.

These elements deconstruct what was stablished by Sergei Eisenstein during the golden age of
Russian cinema and let us finally understand that, even if we use them as references, VR
needs its new language.
Film was defined as the encounter of two different images that modify one another,
generating new significations. Once the frame is gone, we don’t have those different images
anymore, but a co-existence of events. Writing VR experiences, in my case about paintings, is
a logic of events that surrender us, happen to us, or are created by us. Everything can be
potentially an event, for instance the change or evolution of textures and materials, or the
process of construction (drawing in space, brushstrokes in motion…). We can re-enact the
painting scene, its creation or its interpretations. Vision goes beyond, the eye can connect to
other senses or, even, produceing synesthesia.

Although the clash of two images is the basis of film, the effect of reality in our biological
body, is what creates a VR experience. S Eisenstein was already aware of this while creating
“The Glass House”, a theatre play that happened in a transparent glass building. His notes and
drawings for stage direction where based on three axeis, also showing what we could see in
depth, through the walls, going on simultaneously (in a room people were sleeping, in another
there was a house breaking…). We could see everyone everywhere, but they didn’t. One day,
one of the characters hits himself against a wall and wakes up to reality: he could see
everything and he had to choose between doing something or not, knowing that he could
be/was able to do it or not.

With that/This being said, I want to highlight the implicit political side of VR, because we are
exercising on user’s bodies with a proposal, with a discourse, using comfortable,
uncomfortable or transgressive moments or events. We have to keep in mind the importance
of body in VR, to express something that (si tu veux mettre en valeur “nous”, c’est correct…)
only we can embody or live, something that has no words /that is difficult to grasp with
words.