Tesserice
4D VR Mediascape featured at ARS Electronic, ISEA, and other international film festivals and technology and science conferences.
by Jared Christopher Kelley, Max Orozco, Clea T. Waite
Climate change is a defining issue of our time. How do we comprehend the recession of a glacier that progresses over three generations or the slowing of an oceanic current? Are we, as humans, capable of being sensitized to planetary scales of matter and time that are far beyond our physical experience? The geological provides a glimpse of time as a supra-dimensional force, a four-dimensional perspective that subsumes both past and future and whose deep-time view far exceeds human perception. The cryosphere, Earth’s frozen poles, is a frozen, four-dimensional container of Earth's atmosphere, providing a view 800,000 years back into the history of Earth's climate. Its glaciers manifest a hyperspace of environmental time.
TesserIce is an immersive mediascape in four-dimensional hyperspace enacting the space-time of glacial ice from within a crystal tesseract, a 4D hypercube. TesserIce is a hyper-documentary poem revealing the space-time effects of climate change on the ice.
The participant enters a tesseract architecture composed of different scales, locations, and speeds of polar ice created from film and sound elements of the cryosphere. Their movements propel them along the four axes of this tesseract, through different rooms, as the 4D space unfolds in unchartered vistas, juxtapositions, and timeframes. The space-time of ice is revealed.
Reality is a hyper-volume of past and future matter extending along the limitless axis of time and outside our sensory perception. Evidence of this space-time hypervolume is our perception of changing matter over time: rusting objects, geological strata, coral reefs, and melting icecaps for example. Visualizing four-dimensional structures from the confines of our three-dimensional space is a question that continually challenges mathematicians and artists. Most “solutions'' envision these structures from a distance, looking at them rather than experiencing them from within. These are shadows of shadows – the 2D screen renderings of the 3D shadow projections of the 4D object. The 3D space and navigability of VR provide an opportunity to experience the shifting landscape and acoustic environment of 4D space, the space-time tesseract of polar ice, from within the fourth dimension. TesserIce constructs a tesseract of polar ice in time as an embodied cine-poem – a hyperspace of spatialized meaning and navigable space-time, enacting the strange data vistas that surround us in manifold meta-dimensions.
