Sharing the Space

I expected to be confronted with certain questions about navigable space and control in the Cave, but the process of sharing the Cave experience with other students was an interesting complication to these ideas. We each had an opportunity to wear the tracked glasses, which allowed us to truly control our own perspective on the projects, as well as to alter and define the perspectives of others. Wearing the normal, non-tracked glasses didn't take much away from my experience of the individual pieces, but the reality that my own experience of the Cave was really actually a composite of my own perspective and another person's influenced, in a more theoretical way, my experience of the projects.

For example, in Glitch, the final project, a voice repeatedly asked "Do you know where you are?" The answer to that question depends on the framework of location - as far as the program was concerned, everybody in the Cave was at the exact same spot - wherever the person who wore the tracked glasses was standing. My own experienced location was somewhere between where I was actually standing and the place where the program expected me to be - which of the two was my "true" location? It depends on whether location is a physical or a symbolic quality - or somewhere in between.

I keep returning to that idea that meaning lies in the gap between virtual and real life - in this case, I found the simple question "do you know where you are?" to address this kind of meaning. Ultimately, "where I am" lies somewhere between my real and my symbolic locations inside the physical Cave & the virtual space created within it.