Call: 3/25 talk: Immersed in Restoration, with Glen Fraser, John Harrison and Jacki Morie

Call for Participation

Immersed in Restoration: With Guest Speakers Glen Fraser, John Harrison and Jacki Morie
Thursday March 25th, 2021 at 9 am PST
Museum of Other Realities (MOR) – Online (https://www.museumor.com/)
https://www.museumor.com/blog/immersed-in-restoration-with-guest-speakers-glen-fraser-john-harrison-and-jacki-morie

Our next talk event on March 25th, 2021 at 9 am PST stirs up the pressing question concerning the temporality of VR art. We’re honoured to host and extend the perspective of VR long-timers Glen Fraser, John Harrison and Jacki Morie as our guest speakers for ‘Immersed in Restoration’.

While it might surprise contemporary VR artists in 2021 to hear about the first three decades of VR art history, the question to also raise is why don’t people know about these early works? Can they still be experienced now, and where? What would it take to resurrect them? In this MOR Salon event moderated by Jacki Morie, we’ll look at a famous 1995 VR artwork by Char Davies, and hear from its guardians what efforts have been made to keep it alive and running for future audiences to enjoy.

MEET THE GUEST SPEAKERS

About Glen Fraser

Glen Fraser builds software for the interactive and immersive arts. Experienced in graphics, sound and device programming, he developed VR projects at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Telepresence Research in the early 1990s, before shifting to create commercial tools for 3D artists at Softimage, in Montreal. After moving to Spain, he contributed to audiovisual performing arts and open source projects, and has become active in the local live coding community. Immersence contracted him to remaster Osmose and Ephémère in 2013, and he continues to collaborate with Char Davies on new projects.

About John Harrison

John Harrison is a Software Engineer whose focus is on working with artists to develop VR artworks. He developed some of the earliest VR art installations, including over a dozen works produced at the Banff Centre for the Arts from 1991-94. From there, he focused on creating VR installations for Char Davies in Montreal, Canada, developing Osmose (1995) and Éphémère (1998), which subsequently toured worldwide. After stints as a developer for Softimage|XSI and as a computer vision PhD student at McGill University, he has returned to the art world, and is now working at Immersence to develop innovative tools for the creation of new artworks.

About Jacki Morie

Dr. Jacquelyn Ford Morie is known for her use of Virtual Reality (VR) to deliver meaningful experiences that enrich people’s lives. She developed multi-sensory techniques for VR that predictably elicit emotional responses from participants, and through her company All These Worlds, LLC, makes virtual worlds for social connectivity, Mindfulness, storytelling and stress relief for veterans and others. She recently built a virtual world ecosystem for NASA called ANSIBLE, designed to provide psychological benefits for future astronauts who will undertake extremely long isolated missions to Mars. Dr. Morie is currently working on a new version of her patented scent device to bring more emotional power to VR.

A little more about this restoration project offered up from Glen Fraser’s blog, in his own words –

Immersence is Char’s research company, which was founded in 1998 to continue the work she’d started at Softimage. Shortly after its founding, I believe Immersence purchased the last four dVisor headsets produced, just before Division went out of the HMD business entirely. This turned out to be a smart move; a couple of those headsets continue to function – sort of – though neither of them does so gladly. And until the Vive and Rift headsets came along this year, the pickings were slim for a good replacement headset.”

Hear the full story by joining us on Thursday morning. See you in the MOR on Thursday at 9 am PT!

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