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Fool’s Paradise Virtual Reality Installation and Performance page 1 of 6

◆ Fool’s ParadiseVirtual Reality Installation and Performance

◆ Contact Information

Paul Hertz 773-975-9153 (home/studio)2215 W. Fletcher St. 847-467-2443 (office)Chicago, IL 60618-6403 [email protected]://ignotus.com/

◆ Project Abstract

Fools Paradise is an intermedia performance created by artist Paul Hertz and composer StephenDembski. Dembski scored forty-eight selected proverbs from visionary poet Willam Blake’s “Proverbsof Hell” for soprano, cello, and flute. Hertz created a virtual world where each song is associatedwith its own locus on an island in the shape of a book, floating in a sea of stars. The artists used acommon “parametric space” to develop the work as an intermedia composition and are developing anew version where the parametric space governs events in an interactive VR installation.

◆ Project Description

Participants in Fool’s Paradise navigate through the virtual world using a VR wand and head trackinggear. As they navigate, they trigger musical and visual events. In front of the performer orparticipant (the VR navigator) floats a mask whose position responds to the VR wand. By enteringloci marked by sculptural elements the navigator triggers the performance of a song and theappearance of a new mask. The new mask accompanies the performer to the next locus. Eachsculpture that has been visited is replaced by the image of its mask, floating in the air. All masks turntheir gaze towards the navigator.

Multi-channel spatialized audio software developed by Paul Hertz moves the music and other soundsthrough space, controlled by the navigator’s position and rules developed from the underylingparametric space of the composition. Granular synthesis techniques create an aura of fragmentarymusic around the loci. In the installation, the trail of the navigator through the space remixes therecorded performance and permits the discovery of a complete song at each locus. In performance,live musicians follow cues from the navigator’s trail through the virtual world to mix live andsynthesized music and perform a complete song when the navigator activates a locus.

VR navigation in performance begins in a dark cave on one side of the island and ends at a cascade ofwords that falls over a mesa into the sea. As an installation, the work does not have a specificbeginning and ending, but will return navigation to the cave any time the installation is left alonefor a period of time. Wayfinding cues such as a stairway ascending to the top of the tableland fromthe cave and new vocal material help installation visitors decide where to go.

As a composition, Fool’s Paradise is grounded in abstract notational structures that help todetermine its visual architecture, musical material, and event-flow. In other words, it is anintermedia artwork, where events in one sensory modality may be mapped onto events in anothermodality.

Fools Paradise approaches technology from a critical point of view and engages culture as ahistorically rooted enterprise. Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, from which the texts are selected,presents a critique of the tyranny of religious institutions and a plea for freedom that resonatestoday. The use of VR as a performance medium rather than as a passively explored architecture, theblending of live acoustic music with electronics, and the use of hand-painted and scanned texturemaps in a VR landscape all point to the historical continuity of art traditions. New media do notdisplace old; rather, they engage each other in complex feedback loops. As artists, first of all wecreate experiences—not precious objects or new-minted cultural values. We honor Blake as amultimedia artist avant la lettre, an artist who melds poetic language with printed and paintedimage in his books. Like him, we seek to meld different languages into a robust and complex whole.


◆ Documentation Links

All documentation for this proposal can be found here:http://ignotus.com/paradise/

Short videos of Fool’s Paradise performance, May 1, 2004:http://ignotus.com/paradise/fp3min.mov (3 minutes)http://ignotus.com/paradise/fp8min.mov (8 minutes)

Documentation of the development of Fool’s Paradise, including the complete score:http://collaboratory.nunet.net/phertz/portfoli/foolspar/index.htmlhttp://collaboratory.nunet.net/phertz/portfoli/foolspar/score/http://ignotus.com/paradise/audio42.html (Song 42, audio/score)

Online portfolios and web sites:http://ignotus.com/http://collaboratory.nunet.net/phertz/portfoli/http://www.scattershot.org/dembski/

◆ Images from Fool’s Paradise Performance (2004)

Performance space with musicians on left, projection in center, VR navigator to the right.

Aerial view of the tableland in the virtual world, with 48 event loci


To create a little flower is the labour of the ages.

The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructivesword. are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.

At each locus in Fool’s Paradise a different “mask” accompanies the performance one of 48 differentsongs. A performance may consist of some or all 48 songs, in an order determined by the VRnavigator. Cues from the VR world prepare the musicians for each song, and present them with thescore for the current song. The masks are first executed in watercolor and then digitized and scaledfor use as texture maps. They can be exhibited as part of an installation of Fool’s Paradise. Followingare some of the texture maps.


A selection of texture maps for masks in Fool’s Paradise.


◆ Intermedia Composition in Fool’s Paradise

Pitch class aspect of parametric space used as source material in musical composition of Fool’s Paradise.

Many aspects of Fool’s Paradise were developed in collaboration between a digital multimedia artist,Paul Hertz, and a composer, Stephen Dembski. Hertz had developed a body of theory for intermediacomposition, which proved to have useful analogues to Dembski’s theories of extended tonality.Thus, the diagram above plots the relative positions of event loci in the virtual world and it alsorepresents the available tonal material at each locus. In future developments of Fool’s Paradise, Hertzand Dembski plan to use the topology of the graph of the parametric space to generate rules forremixing audio “grains” from a multi-channel recording of Fool’s Paradise made after theperformance. If in the original composition of Fool’s Paradise intermedia correspondences worked ata relatively large scale, in the version in development they will work at a much finer granularity,managing real time audio synthesis under the partial control of the VR navigator.

Diagram of VR world with navigator track (orange dots on black line) andpenumbral regions(shaded circles) surrounding each locus (solid circles).

The navigator track is an invisible record of the navigator’s recent positions in the virtual space. It isdesigned as a series of event triggers (orange dots) distributed over an inverse kinematics system ofweights and springs. If the navigator moves rapidly, the track stretches out. If she moves slowly, itcontracts. If she stops, it collapses to a point. Pulses (black triangle) flowing back from thenavigator’s current position trigger audio events. Audio grains are selected out of the songassociated with each penumbral region where a trigger is located and remixed.


◆ Revisions to Visual Design and Music

Sketch of new sculptural elements for the 48 loci in Fool’s Paradise.Along with way-finding elements and an extended interface for real time audio synthesis cued toposition and wand gestures, the virtual world will use sculptural elements more in keeping with thethe mythology of Blake’s poetry than the icosahedral “jewels” of the first performance.

Stephen Dembski has written new vocal material based on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell which weare currently recording. The new material helps to establish the setting of the virtual world andprovide it with a sense of narrative direction.

◆ Installation

Performance and installation require somewhat different configurations.

For the installation, two projectors project two slightly different images—one from a right eyeperspective, the other from a left eye perspective—through polarizing filters onto a rear projectionsscreen. Visitors to the installation stand in front of the screen and wear polarized glasses that blockone image and pass the other, so that each eye sees a the image intended for it. As a result visitorswill see the virtual world in stereo, particularly if they are privileged to wear the tracking device andnavigate with the wand.

For the performance, one projector will provide a larger image for an audience. The VR navigatorwho controls the voyage through the virtual world will not need to stand in front of the screen, butcan follow the navigation on a monitor. Ideally, the audience will be surrounded by eight-channelspatialized sound.

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