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Category: History
SIGGRAPH 95

SIGGRAPH, the annual conference of computer graphics and interactive techniques, is featuring virtual reality in a number of venues this year, including the VR Village, an Immersive Realities (AR/VR) Contest, and a handful of panel sessions on the topic.

Virtual reality as a medium of creative expression is thankfully resurgent again, as an increasing number of artists gain access to powerful tools that were once arcane and largely unaffordable. But while the means are becoming available to more people, the same sorts of questions exist today as did during the earlier wave of creative discovery within VR during the early 1990s.

Twenty years ago, at SIGGRAPH 1995, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel of pioneering artists who were then actively producing works using immersive VR. Being the anniversary of that event, I had pulled the proceedings off the shelf and was pleasantly surprised to see how relevant the questions remain even to today’s many artists working in this space.

The panelists’ works are lost to time, except in terms of any documentation collected, in the sense that decades-old technology would be needed to be resurrect them for the audience in 2015. But it is striking how the observations and analytical thinking of these early explorers transcend time. But then again, a key premise of the panel was that the act of creating is practically as old as our species and that the “purpose of the aesthetic action has and always will be to visualize ideas and to explore our environments using whatever devices are available.”