These environments seek to recreate two installations by the pioneer British video artist David Hall: A Situation Envisaged: The Rite II (Cultural Eclipse) (1988-90) and TV Interruptions (7 TV Pieces): The Installation (1971/2006). They were both conceived by researcher Adam Lockhart, in collaboration with artists Rhoda Ellis and Sang-Hun Yu, as experiments in the use of virtual reality for the simulation and preservation of media artworks.
The initiative represents an informal development of the research project Rewind: British Artists’ Video in the 1970s & 1980s, from the College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee, Scotland, which has recovered and remastered more than 450 works. It is from this collection from which the video matrices used in the virtual galleries came. The rest of the components were modeled in 3D in order to imitate the equipment and the original layout of Hall’s pieces. A great deal of attention has been paid to the design of cathode-ray monitors that look and behave in a credible manner.
Both environments exemplify how virtual reality can be used to provide the experience of the qualities of a media object that do not fit in the single-channel record. Used in this way, simulation offers new ways for art history to deal with the problems caused by the physical degradation of works and the obsolescence of its technological components.
This does not mean, however, that the translation of the installations into the new medium has been fully accomplished. The videos’ framerate, for example, had to be reduced in order to guarantee the stability of their simultaneous playback in the virtual environment. Adaptations like this indicate the construction of a new type of computational realism conditioned by an economy of processing resources.