Osmose Review

Mike King
London Guildhall University
41 Commercial Road
London E1 1LA
kingm@lgu.ac.uk

Osmose is a Virtual Reality installation currently touring the UK as part of the 'Serious Games' exhibition, and is a ground-breaking use of the technology in fine art. I am probably both the best and the worst person to review Osmose, for the following reasons. I am instinctively sympathetic to the piece because I share so many of the interests of the creator, but unfortunately this also makes me more critical than the average participant.

Char Davies, its creator, is a painter who happens to be the Director of Visual Research at SoftImage. This is the Montreal-based producer of the computer animation system of the same name, recently bought out by Microsoft. Her aims in the creation of Osmose all strike chords with me: she wants to reproduce some of the qualities of mystical experiences of Nature in a VR piece; she wants to create an experience not of doing as prevalent in combat games using the same technology, but of being. Osmose is intended to be reflective, gentle, immersive  qualities that relate to Char's experiences of Nature , and anchoring in bodily experience. In her own notes on Osmose she discusses an experience while scuba-diving which was mystical, and in a recent interview for a British TV programme on cyberspace she mentions a mystical experience that she underwent in a field. I understand that these have been instrumental both in her work as painter, and in the development of Osmose. As I have been researching the subject of Nature Mysticism for some years I welcome any attempt to use cyberspace technologies to introduce this subject to new audiences. I am also sympathetic to her desire to redress our culture's privileging of mind over matter which (in her own words) 'has contributed to the devaluing of the body, as well as women and various "others"'.

I believe that Nature Mysticism is important for two reasons: firstly it is a spirituality appropriate to a secular age, and secondly, by emphasising a love of Nature, it can underpin the growing ecological awareness needed for our survival. It is in this context that I am interested in Osmose.

What is Osmose however? It is a virtual reality installation using a head-mounted display (HMD) and a chest-mounted sensor for measuring the breathing. A Silicon Graphics Onyx provides a real-time 3D rendered view of a virtual world consisting of a dozen 'levels', and an audio sub-system generates a sound track which will be unique to each participant's journey. My only previous experience of HMD-type VR is with the Sega 'Space Mission' ride at SegaWorld in London. Osmose differed in its input device however; no buttons or joysticks, but a custom-made chest-mounted device for responding to the user's breathing. Once this is adjusted by the assistant one is ready for 'immersion'. The image quality of Osmose is significantly better than  with the Sega ride, though still quite low resolution and a little faint. (SGI's 'RealityMonster' graphics supercomputer offering 80 million polygons per second would offer near photo-realistic VR, in comparison, and may be the shape of things to come.) Osmose opens with an initial set of 3D grids (used to establish the basic navigation techniques) which are enticing in themselves as a definition of a space to be explored, and were effectively depth-cued to add to the sense of distance. 

As the grids faded away one is left to expand or contract one's chest in order to descend or ascend the virtual world. Leaning forward, backward, or to either side moves one in those directions, and turning one's whole body around enables one to gain a 360 degree panoramic survey of the space. The virtual world of Osmose is a stratified universe where the word is both at its foundations and at is apex; the levels inbetween represent a version of nature. The lowest level (reached only after emptying the lungs for a period) consists of planes covered with the text of the source code for Osmose (recognisably C code), while the highest level is again textual, but this time containing quotes from poets and philosophers in many languages. The metaphor is clear: the word as code or DNA is the foundation of our physical existence, while the word of our greatest thinkers represents the peak of our experience.

In practice one is not enticed to spend long in either of the textual levels: it is the representations of nature in the middle worlds that make Osmose so powerful. A tree is the centrepiece of this layer, and around the tree is a 'landscape' comprising a river and forest. The elements of this world are all semi-transparent, and by approaching a leaf one can enter its cellular level and see the transport of shimmering nutrients.

The general reaction of Osmose participants is highly favourable, and couched in terms ranging from pleasure to awe. The television cyberspace documentary mentioned above showed several participants who were clearly deeply affected, and the visitors' books in Montreal and Newcastle are full of simple responses like Brilliant, Wow!, Magic!, and also more considered statements including:

Blimey! I think I'll go and write a book about this.

This is really brilliant, very innovative, very enjoyable very shocking, very relaxing  well done the Laing [Gallery].

A Chance Encounter Which Shan't Be Forgotten.

Amazing! finally V.R. as good art! I'm looking forward your [sic] next work!

Out of ten favourable comments like this there might have been one negative one, for example one person commented that there was not enough colour in the work; another thought it should be made more interesting for children.

Most reviewers within the electronic arts have also been favourable, with the exception of the team from Mute, the London-based broadsheet of digital art critique. The basis of their objection seemed to be firstly a hostility to the goals set by Davies (dismissing them as a kind of human-potential psycho-babble), and secondly to the sheer cost of producing the installation. It is true that the original Silicon Graphics machine used to run it could cost up to CDN$ 1m (depending on configuration), and that on current prices this has fallen to only about a quarter of this figure, but there are VR-capable systems evolving from the bottom up on PC and Mac platforms that will soon give access to this medium for the majority of electronic artists. The sarcastic boxed quote in the Mute article: 'I wonder at the brilliant interpretative insight of this artist to make the leaf green!' gives an idea of the general tone of the article.

As an honest reviewer I have to say that I was however less impressed with the experience than most participants. I think the reason for this is that, as a person who has an active interest in nature mysticism and has carried out extensive research into the subject, the natural world in Osmose is too literal. True, some of it looks fairly abstract, but some of it is a direct quote: scanned images of leaves have been texture mapped onto flapping polygons, for example. For me then, this is the main weakness of the piece: the spiritual in 20th century art has been inextricably linked with the development of abstraction (a thesis put forward by the art historian Roger Lipsey for example), yet Osmose uses a literalness more appropriate to the 19th century.

But Char Davies might be right. One of the world's greatest nature mystics, Walt Whitman, had this to say about the general approach to nature:

"All such things need to be at least the third or fourth remove; in itself it would be too much for nine out of ten readers. Very few care for natural objects themselves, rocks, rain, hail, wild animals, tangled forests, weeds, mud, common Nature. They want her in a shape fit for reading about in a rocking-chair, or as ornaments in china, marble or bronze. The real things are, far more than they would own, disgusting, revolting to them." 

To Whitman's list of china, marble and bronze we can now add VR; it certainly is nature at third or fourth remove. For me Osmose is 'ornamental' in Whitman's sense, but for the majority of participants it clearly works. Henry Thoreau (a contemporary of Whitman) may have a point when he wrote:

"I walk towards one of our ponds, but what signifies the beauty of Nature when men are base? We walk to lakes to see our serenity reflected in them; when we are not serene, we go not to them."

Although the Victorian use of the word 'base' may obscure his meaning to us, I think that Thoreau's point is this: if you are already attuned to Nature you see its beauty, and are drawn to it; if you are not attuned to it its beauty will not draw you to it. What then can break into this vicious cycle? Answer: Osmose, or any work of art or literature that reflects on Nature. The fact that it is too literal for me may be because I 'care for natural objects themselves' as Whitman puts it.

Another of my interests leads me to make another criticism of Osmose: the relation to breathing. While I know nothing of diving, I have studied the Indian system of pranayama, breath-control. Davies is quite right in placing an emphasis on breathing in the context of shift from doing to being; it said that the Buddha, for example, attained enlightenment through the practice of breath-awareness (loosely called vipassana). However the Indian system places an emphasis on the depth and regularity of breathing (and, interestingly on the turning points between in- and out-breath), but the system used by Osmose forces one to breath shallowly, either with the lungs relatively empty (in order to descend) or relatively full (in order to ascend). Davies' goal is only half-met: to bring about a change in a person's psyche, the soma (body) needs to breathe fully. Bringing a person's attention to the breathing in any form is however valuable, and I don't doubt that this device does contribute to the overall experience.

However Osmose is clearly a watershed in the evolution of VR as an artistic medium, and anyone attempting something similar will have to acknowledge this. To carp at it because the sheer cost prevents wider participation is absurd: costs are tumbling exponentially, and similar though cruder results can be achieved with affordable equipment, even now. My personal objection to its literalness is probably at the heart of the artistic problem with VR: three-dimensional space is so fundamental to the structure of our universe and to our experience of it that we don't yet know how to play with it in VR. My instinct is that the painter may be in the best position to do this, but needs to revisit the birth of abstraction in the early part of this century for clues.