Nicole Stenger is a French-born American artist, pioneer in

virtual reality Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), educ ...

and Internet movies. In 1989 to 1991, she was a research fellow at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the mo ...

(CAVS & Visual Arts Program, now merged into ACT). In 1991 to 1992, she was a visiting scholar at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (Hitlab) in Seattle. Her works have been featured in the

SIGGRAPH SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques) is an annual conference on computer graphics (CG) organized by the ACM SIGGRAPH, starting in 1974. The main conference is held in North America; SIGGRAPH Asia ...

Art Show, the FILE Festival, the JavaMuseum, the Cartier Art Foundation and are part of the Archive of Digital Art (ADA). In 2013, she was included in the "Contemporary women artists on the web" collection of the

National Museum of Women in the Arts The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), located in Washington, D.C., is "the first museum in the world solely dedicated" to championing women through the arts. NMWA was incorporated in 1981 by Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay. Since openin ...

, in Washington, D.C. To this day, Stenger is considered to be one of the first artists to explore the artistic virtual reality medium.

Early VR works

Between 1989 and 1992, she created ''Angels'', the first immersive movie. The project foundation was laid out at the Visual Arts Program at MIT, employing

Wavefront In physics, the wavefront of a time-varying ''wave field'' is the set (locus) of all points having the same ''phase''. The term is generally meaningful only for fields that, at each point, vary sinusoidally in time with a single temporal freque ...

's Advanced Visualizer on a

Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...

personal IRIS. The VR work was done at the Hitlab (University of Washington) using VPL's Virtualization interface and its Body Electric software running on the IRIS. Angels is a real-time interactive immersive movie, a kind of travel in a virtual paradise. The participant uses a VPL

Dataglove A wired glove (also called a dataglove or cyberglove) is an input device for human–computer interaction worn like a glove. Various sensor technologies are used to capture physical data such as bending of fingers. Often a motion tracker, such a ...

and high-resolution HRX goggles developed by

Jaron Lanier Jaron Zepel Lanier (, born May 3, 1960) is an American computer scientist, visual artist, computer philosophy writer, technologist, futurist, and composer of contemporary classical music. Considered a founder of the field of virtual reality, La ...

. Following Tom Furness' theory, the artwork was developed for the three senses: vision, audio and touch, though the technological restraints at the time could only implement vision, audio, and a non tactile data glove. Each user starts his/her experience in front of an odd carousel that is a passage to more VR worlds. Touching one of the three angels’ hearts in the carousel, defines the range in which the following three segments will appear. The duration of the sections varies from just about 30" to 2'30". The brilliantly colourful environments are a gateway to more scenes. The angels' voices ask the users to interact with them, causing a story to open. The music was composed by Diane Thome. While at MIT, Stenger also contributed to the seminal ''Cyberspace First Steps'' edited by Michael L. Benedikt with the now famous essay "Mind is a Leaking Rainbow".Stenger 1991, p. 48-57.

Online works

In the 1990s, after the completion of her VR project, Stenger worked on

VRML VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language, pronounced ''vermal'' or by its initials, originally—before 1995—known as the Virtual Reality Markup Language) is a standard file format for representing 3-dimensional (3D) interactive vector graphi ...

works and developed online art projects that are early examples of web cinema. ''My Faux Cinema''’s website (1998–2003) was a project composed of web pages with animated gifs, java applets, open source audio files, textual parts written by Stenger or sampled from the Internet. It included VRML movies, web books and “faux films”. Stenger's web books, ''To Dream or Not to Eat'' (1998), ''California Trilogy'' (1996-2000), ''Nature'' (2000), ''Nanfei in Waspland'' (2000) show her innovative spirit.A web book is a kind of book with a story, a cover, an introduction, a conclusion, and a narrative of seven to twelve pages. The “faux films”, ''Fresh!'' (2000) and ''Bitchery'' (2001), are stylistic jokes. They mimic cinema moving images through javascripts. Fauxcinema

Recent works

During the first decade of the 21st century, Stenger worked on a series of VRML movies and environments, which, though she had no more access to VR interfaces, were still conceived for immersion. In 2001, she created ''Chambers''. The movie, completed days before 9/11, is an emotional journey through the different stages of a dying love. Towards the end of the decade, Stenger concluded her Virtual Reality trilogy with ''Dynasty'' (2007-2009). ''Dynasty'' is composed of 15 scenes with music by

Tchaikovsky Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky , group=n ( ; 7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893) was a Russian composer of the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music would make a lasting impression internationally. He wrote some of the most popu ...

. The movie is a travel through time, in which users revisit their childhood and meet their ancestors from a remote past. In 2011 Stenger completed ''The Isle That Was A Book'', another VRML piece, based on a 1970s Beat Poetry book with 14 texts read by Stenger. In 2012, she composed a short story for Twitter called ''IS IT U, I U?'' ''(I U=Internet Unicorn)''. Her last published work is ''TheyNuked My Lettuce!'' (2012). Created in

Machinima Machinima, originally machinema () is the use of real-time computer graphics engines to create a cinematic production. Most often, video games are used to generate the computer animation. The word "machinima" is a portmanteau of the words ''ma ...

style, this 3D/2D animation is a cautionary tale on the effects of cyberwar on our daily lives. The Wish (2015) is Stenger's most recent VR film which incorporated music from Mozart and Victoria Mariano. In 2016, Stenger began experimenting with moving past projects into Unity and Oculus for VR game exploration. The first release of this was the Dynasty Experience in 2016 which incorporated Stenger's film Dynasty (2007–2009) into the Oculus Rift platform for VR exploration. The process was also done with Angles (1989–1991) in 2017 and Chambers (2001) in 2018. In 2019, The Wish VR and The Isle VR were announced to be under development. The Wish VR part one and part two have been published on Stenger website in 2020. In 2021, Stenger's continues to focus on incorporating more of her previous VR films into VR related programs.

Notes

References

Popper, Frank Frank Popper (17 April 1918 – 12 July 2020) was a Czech-born French-British historian of art and technology and Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and the Science of Art at the University of Paris VIII. He was decorated with the medal of the Lé ...

(1994). ''Art of the Electronic Age''. University of Michigan. * Popper, Frank (2007). ''From Technological to Virtual Art''. MIT Press. * Stenger, Nicole (1991). "Mind is a Leaking Rainbow". Michael L. Benedikt (ed). ''Cyberspace First Steps''. MIT Press: 48–57. . * Thome, Diane (1995). "Reflections on Collaborative Process and Compositional Revolution". ''Leonardo Music Journal'', 5: 29–32. *Ben Delaney (2014). "Virtual Reality 1.0 - The 90's". CyberEdge Journal. SIGGRAPH 92. *John Grimes (1992). "SIGGRAPH 1992: Art Show". ACMSIGGRAPH Art Show Archives.

Exhibitions

* SIGGRAPH 1992: Art Show (1992) * Beaux Arts, Paris (1993 & 1994) * Dotcom Gallery New York (1996) * NTT Art Center, Tokyo (1997) * Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo (2003) * "Celebrate" Java Museum 10 years, Cologne (2010) * "Contemporary Women Artists on the Web" National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington (2013)

External links

Nicole Stenger's Official Website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Stenger, Nicole French artists American digital artists Women digital artists New media artists American installation artists Virtual reality pioneers Living people Computer animation people 21st-century American women artists Year of birth missing (living people)