Coyote, 2022
Virtual Reality Installation
~ interactive application, game, shared environment, invitation to the metaverse.
COMMENTARY ON THE ARTWORK
The work is a virtual reality environment created using digital tools and 3D software, implemented in virtual space through the Unreal Engine. Immersive participation and full experience are made possible via a VR headset and controllers.
The piece is based on Joseph Beuys’ action I Like America & America Likes Me. The actual space of the René Block Gallery has been digitally reconstructed here as it appeared during Beuys’ performance in May 1974. This space functions as a metaphor, a background — a reference to a universal dialectic, while the coyote symbolizes reality itself. The space simultaneously is and is not a space; it is and is not finite; it is and is not real, yet it remains rooted in a real-world context. The virtual entirety is anchored in the physical realm — the gallery’s interior is outlined on the floor at a 1:1 scale, including reconstructions of elements present during Beuys’ performance, such as straw and copies of The Wall Street Journal.
In addition to sound within the VR environment (heard through the headset) — the coyote’s noises and three strikes of a triangle instrument — there is also sound emanating from the real space: a subwoofer hidden under a pile of straw emits turbine-like vibrations, creating strong sound waves that make the floor surface tremble.
The very term “virtual reality installation” already reveals a duality — the opposition between real and virtual, and thus the dual nature of artistic and research practice, and more broadly, of living art itself.
Despite its technologically advanced form, the work’s inner structure has been built similarly to that of a performance. It is based on a stochastic process — randomness, chance, and unpredictability are its key components. Each coyote animation (preprogrammed behavior) is selected at random by an algorithm. The sequence of events cannot be predicted, and no configuration repeats itself. The general outline of the piece consists of a set of constituent elements, but the development of the action — the process — is left entirely to chance within a given context: Art “S,” in time “t,” in place “m,” in situation “x,” in relation to person(s) “o.” The succession of sequences is both synchronic and diachronic — their chronology is unpredictable. I have no control over the process. The participant has only indirect control. The algorithm decides.
By putting on the headset, the participant becomes the sole active performer of the action. Displaying the headset’s view on an external monitor allows others to “peek in,” participating passively. The material character of the artwork has been reduced to a virtual spectacle — an experiment unfolding between reality and imagination, existing only for a specific time within a specific context.
Entering the virtual space is meant to intensify the individual experience — even more so because it confronts the participant alone with an unpredictable situation, something entirely new and unfamiliar. This unpredictability introduces an element of danger through the unknown. The resulting uncertainty amplifies perception, inviting an experiment in behavioral response to this reality–nonreality.
The work is indirectly structured as a game. The user–participant dons the headset and enters a virtual space where the action unfolds — sometimes static, sometimes dynamic.
“Art is a game once its elements are established […] Art-as-game becomes interesting when the number of elements and the structure of rules allow for multiple combinations.”
The participant ceases to be a mere player and becomes a creator (of the game). Art, in this sense, provides a form of construction.
“We act in a situation of uncertainty, not knowing what is true and what is false. […] Every new factor can reverse the course of events. The outcome of this game is not predetermined, and changes continue as long as the game lasts.”
— Jan Świdziński, on contextual art
The fundamental research problem in relation to this artwork is the dialectic of performance art — and above all, the question: What can performance be, and how can its concept be expanded to include immaterial, virtual aspects?
My intention was to create and simultaneously reconstruct a space and context — to use them in a way that parallels how performance constructs experience. Performance realizes itself through action; its essential quality is totality: nothing precedes it, nothing stands beside it. It exists here and now, in relation to someone and something.
This work is an attempt to create a total action — one that engages as many senses as possible. Virtual reality, with its highly graphic user interface, appears to be an ideal space for contemporary art. The possibilities here are limitless. Whatever we conceive and design — in all its detail — can be digitally generated. This is the potential of virtual reality.
Virtual Reality has been defined as a computer-generated simulation system that detects user behavior, providing a sense of presence and embodiment in a virtual environment through multisensory feedback. Last year, I wrote an article for the academic journal inAW Journal – Multidisciplinary Academic Magazine on VR as an artistic tool. I will cite a passage here to support the rationale and conceptual grounding of my work:
VR / AR / MR (Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality) have necessarily accelerated in development, permeating ever-larger areas of human activity. They have long moved beyond the realm of gaming, to which they were initially confined.
The key concept distinguishing these virtual technologies is the level of immersion. VR, being the most immersive — with its highly graphic interface and all-encompassing internal world — enables total immersion in the depths of virtual space.
In the era of technological acceleration brought about by the pandemic, the anticipated integration of VR/AR technologies and robotics into everyday life is becoming a tangible reality. Posthumanism will merge culture and industry. Virtual worlds will grow increasingly expansive and sophisticated, driving culture and design, and enabling new forms of expression and experience.
The Metaverse — as a collective, shared virtual space encompassing all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the Internet — will become a fact.
Virtual, yet still reality. Performance is art immersed in reality. It is therefore natural that the search for the new leads here — for, to borrow from Werner Heisenberg:
“Meaning must be expressed in a new language when it can no longer be expressed in the old one.”
