Artists, like astronauts take risks in order to experience and explore new, often bizarre, realities and make them tangible to others.
Fine arts, like the space program, generate spinoffs that are later appropriated and exploited by entrepreneurs, but in the case of artists the spinoffs are cultural or conceptual in nature, manifesting in the commercial realm as styles or attitudes. Advertising imitates Art.
In the process of creating new languages and metaphors, in articulating their experience to evoke experience in others, in actualizing a work of art, artists also engage in research and development.
The expressive tactics developed by artists often have applications and implications well beyond the scope of their original work.
The piece is configured as a jury box with 12 seats and a deliberation room outfitted with 12 immersive head mounted displays. During deliberations juries often re-enact crucial events of a case based on the evidence and testimony presented during a trial. This work takes that process to it's ultimate extreme.
Every alternative theory about the events in Dallas will be embodied in the Kennedy Assassination scenario, and jurors may play any part in it. They may experience Dealy Plaza, November 22, 1962 from the point of view of John Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy or the Secret Service agent jumping onto the back of the limosine. They may drive the limosine, shoot from the window of the School Book Depository or Grassy Knoll. They may ride "the magic bullet" or look through the viewfinder of Zapruder's 8mm camera.
In the Rodney King scenario jurors may choose to drive wildly through the streets of Los Angeles, to club or kick Rodney King, to stand idly by, fend off blows and be struck by tasers, or to videotape the event from a safe distance. The sounds and events heard and seen from each point of view will be based on the testimony of the participant occupying that niche in the historical event.
This piece is intended to be morally neutral, an embodiment of those distortions of reality intrinsic to the process of consensus formation.
Experimental Psychology has demonstrated the unrealiability of eye-witness accounts. The unreliability of news media as a source of anything but a haze of contrivances is obvious.
All reality that has passed through a witness or a medium is virtual.
The Spinoff: The obvious spinoff from this piece is an immersive VR simulation that can be entered as testimony or evidence in actual court proceedings. This novel application for VR may be patentable.
Just as juries have access to charts, depositions and court records during their deliberations, they will have access to our VR system programmed with the scenario presented during trial. This is a natural extension of the current practice of using computer animation to illustrate testimony, but much more visceral, involving, and convincing.
A legal visualization firm will be created offering use of this VR system and simulation services to law firms and trial lawyers as another power tool with which to persuade jurors.
Lease or Lease/Purchase a sufficiently powerful Reality Engine (SGI), modeling and image acquisition tools and the requisite head-mounted displays and gloves.
Obtain news footage and photographs of the events and public figures involved in these two historical events.
Develop 3D dynamic models of the events based on the manifold, often mutually exclusive accounts and scenarios that bloom from these events.
Integrate texture maps and sound samples taken from archival materials with the simulation model.
Ideally all 12 juror/participants in the VR environment will be able to interact independently in the scenario. Alternately, 11 of the jurors might experience the scenario in 'voyeur mode' with the jury's "foreman" controlling the interaction.
Passenger loading: 12 participants will be seated in the jury box and will view clips of the Zapruder film and the Rodney King beating on a standard video monitor. They will then be ushered into the Jury Room where they will be fitted with VR gear and immersed in the virtual environment.