The Fluid Gaze in Virtual Reality
Soudhamini · Chapman University Digital Commons (Chapman University) · 2017
"In 2006, in the course of an Artists Residency in Munich I made a video triptych titled Meditations on the Tiger, in which a story unfolds over three adjacent screens... The story is as linear as it can get, but working with three screens I found I could move laterally as well... There were multiple tracks of time running together on that train - the real time of action and event, the hurtling projected time of anticipation and expectation, and the deep, reflective time of memory, thought and speech. 3 video timelines synchronized so we begin to approach image, just as we have learnt to approach sound (with Stereo and Dolby) as highly differentiated. A close up and a long shot, detail and vista could be shown at the same time – differences in magnitude or quantitative differentiation. At the same time stillness and motion - qualitative differences, opposites even - could be reconciled and balanced. Space, time and mode had all been rendered fluid. Of course I knew none of this when I began... What I did carry in with me though was the ancient Indian notion of the third eye. The eye with which the past, present and future are all viewed with the same sense of equanimity. This idea I used - as inspiration not application - to compose and distribute the action variously across the three screens,though never in a fixed way. And when I finally braided the timelines together I came to realize, that this third eye is not an eye at all but the mind! The triptych made tangible for me what was only an abstract idea till then.