HISMAN BIZRI: LAS MENINAS AND MITOLOGIES
LAS MENINAS is a virtual reality artwork created for the CAVE (C-Automatic Virtual Environment). The painting of the same title, Las Meninas or The Maids of Honor (1656), by the great Spanish painter Diego Velazquez,challenges the viewer with its allegorical subject matter and enigmatic mise-en-scene. From the outset the viewer confronts the artist's canvas which is forever hidden from view. The viewer desires to see what is hidden from him and at the same time witnesses a mise-en-scene which carries within itself multiple allegorical meanings: the mirror in the black frame which reflects the half length figures of King Philip IV and Queen ; Mariana under a red curtain but nothing else in the room; the magical stillness of the room and the people in it, as if photographed, forcing the viewer to believe himself to be actively present at the scene; the painter himself whose "dark form and lit-up face represent the visible and the invisible" (Michel Foucault); the lame devil, Jose Neito, standing in the background holding an open door; the imaginary space outside the picture frame where the painter, the Infanta, one of her maids, the girl dwarf, the courtier in the rear doorway, are looking, each from a different point, at the sovereigns, who are in theory standing next to the viewer, and so forth. Las Meninas in VR starts when a three-dimensional representation of an optically-generated actor or avatar, playing the role of the painter Velazquez enters an empty studio. The actor poses in front of a hidden canvas and then becomes a two-dimensional image. A narrator explains and contextualizes the narrative. The viewer is then able to paint with the wand the rest of the characters as positioned in the original painting. Suddenly, the two-dimentional characters existing in a three-dimensional world become themselves three-dimensional. The Infanta Margaritta guides the viewer in the large studio. The narrator temporarlly suspends his narration as the viewer explores various historical spaces which examine the artist's role in society and; his relationship to power .
MITOLOGIES is a virtual reality artwork created for the CAVE. It is loosely based on the Cretan myth of the Minotaur, the revelations of St. John, Dante's Inferno, and Durer's woodcuts after the revelations. Music from Wagner's Ring is used as a structural motif. The connections between these sources are central to the unfolding of the narrative. Mitologies derives from the Greek word mitos, the thread Ariadne gave Theseus to help him find his way out of the Cretan labyrinth. The participants in Mitologies re-experience allegorically the experience of Theseus. Starting on a boat, they are lead by Donatello's statue Zuccone down a descending river and into an open area of one of the churches St. John addressed in his letters. The church is modeled after a Leonardo Da Vinci sketch of a church that was never built. Surprisingly, the interior of the church opens upon the space of The Great Mosque of Cordoba in Spain. The mosque is the entrance to the labyrinth. Myriad strange, dark, and misleading passages are constructed to create a labyrinth reminiscent of the labyrinth built by Deadalus. The labyrinth is a web, or rhizome: every path is connected with every other one. It has no center and no periphery because it is a potential infinite. To proceed from one tunnel to another, the participants must make the right choices.
Hisham BIZRI
Hisham Bizri is a visual artist who's been working as a filmmaker for the past 12 years. Hisham studied filmmaking at Boston, Harvard, and New York Universities under the direction of Vladamir Petric, Raul Ruiz, and Miklos Jancso. He later worked with Ruiz and Jancso on various film projects in Boston, New York, and Budapest, Hungary. Hisham has made several films and videos which were shown in international festivals in the Louvre, France, South Korea, Canada, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, New York, Washington D.C., Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc. Hisham has also worked as a Creative Director for Orbit Communications Company, Rome, Italy (headquarters). Hisham's current work is in virtual environments, digital film, Interactive Multimedia, and computer animation at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory. He is considered to be the creator of the first virtual reality films. His virtual reality artworks have been shown worldwide.
bizri@evl.uic.edu
http://www.evl.uic.edu/chris/meninas
