Chronicle 2017

PROFILES

A virtual visionary

CHARLOTTE ADELE (CHAR) DAVIES 1973

Profile by Dr. Suzanne Stiegelbauer

Charlotte Adele Davies, PhD, Class of 1973, lives in a log cabin in Quebec’s Eastern Townships surrounded by a thousand acres of forest. No kids. Four horses. And bears. While her work as an artist and public speaker has taken her around the world, it is this particular wild place – forest, rock ledges, streams and enveloping horizon – that is the basis for her work. Though she is recognized as a pioneer in the field of virtual reality, Char produces art which draws attention to the world of nature by using technology to enable others to perceive it freshly, beyond their habitual everyday assumptions. Char’s beginnings as an artist relate to her eyesight (myopic) and her early need for glasses. Without them, she sees a world without objects, where there is only a soft, luminous and voluminous space. “This has truly been a gift, because it offered a way for me to understand and be in the world differently,” she explains. The desire to communicate this difference became a driving force in her work. Char began her career as a painter, making 2-D images. In the mid-1980s, her interest in accessing a “virtual” space on the other side of the picture-plane led to her involvement in building a software company. Softimage became an international leader in the field of 3-D computer graphics and was purchased by Microsoft in 1994. Char worked with technologies associated with virtual reality, or what she prefers to call “immersive

virtual space.” This led to the creation of Osmose in 1995, a fully immersive, interactive virtual environment. Participants wore a stereoscopic head-mounted display and a vest which tracked their breathing and balance, enabling them to seemingly float and interact within the 3-D virtual space. Osmose became world- renowned for its powerful emotional effects. It is considered a landmark in the history of new media art. Creating in 3-D virtual space taught Char to conceptualize spatially, in-the-round. This led to her current work in progress, which encompasses the actual and the virtual. In the same forest which inspired Osmose, she is creating actual landscapes with trees, earth, water and stone. She is also capturing these elements with 3-D laser scanners and, with her team, is developing custom3-D software to communicate her vision of the forest as perpetual transformation. At the same time, she is working to restore and preserve this forest, protecting it in perpetuity from future development. Char remembers her Havergal experience as an opportunity to think of herself “first and foremost as a person, who happened to be female.” It allowed her to escape the world of brothers and male cousins in which, as the girl, she was treated differently. While Char’s art-making is “essentially a solitary conversation I’m having with the universe,” she is also deeply motivated by the desire to communicate – saying, “Hey, look! Isn’t this wonderful? Isn’t it extraordinary to be alive, among All This?”

11

Suzanne Stiegelbauer taught at Havergal from 1971 to 1976.