The ‘Physical Fiction’ of Virtual Reality

Sara Roberts’ exhibition “Physical Fiction” at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena presents four unusual works. Contemplating them leaves the decided and rather unsettling impression that these pieces may, in the 21st century, be regarded as early classics of a new art form.

Roberts is hardly a household name. No wonder, she’s only been significantly seen hereabouts in a previous Art Center group exercise, “Digital Meditations” of 1995. Gallery director Stephen Nowlin, organizer of both shows, is clearly a big, if somewhat cautious, fan. There’s something about encountering art this quietly mind-blowing that causes a certain mistrust of one’s own impressions.

An artist in mid-career, Roberts previously worked in the Bay Area and now directs the Integrated Media program at California Institute of the Arts. Her expressive vehicle is the interactive electronic installation. Technically, that places one of her feet in the world of video games. Her “Untitled Game” actually mimics the arcade format. There, however, the resemblance ends.

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A work like “Elective Affinities” brings to mind the films of French director Eric Rohmer. The piece shares his involvement with bourgeois life viewed with enigmatic detachment, microscopic intimacy and apparent spontaneity. Yet that’s not quite the whole story.

Marshall McLuhan’s 1960 dictum that “The medium is the message” remains as accurate today. Roberts manipulates her means, plants her other foot firmly in the deconstructivist orbit of philosopher Jacques Derrida. It’s a place where meanings float unfixed, a place that conforms to the literary saw, “The writer puts down the words, the reader makes up the story.”

“Elective Affinities” offers the clearest illustration. It places the viewer in a kind of “virtual car.” The background is a theater-size screen. On it unfolds a scene of a highway through the woods as if viewed in a rear-view mirror. Kiosks frame four life-size talking heads. They’re arranged to suggest two 40ish guys in the front seat. In the rear sits one woman about the same age, another younger.

Place yourself in front of any one and their taped thoughts seem to materialize in your mind. The driver muses on his luck in keeping such a beautiful wife despite his philandering. The other guy schemes about a business deal. The older woman rationalizes the way she tolerates her husband’s infidelities, the younger dotes on a fantasy of her companion’s wonderful life.

From such snippets the viewer divines a plot, electing hero, villain, victim and dupe. Literary precedents exist in the classic Rashomon story and the plays of Pirandello. What’s new here is the way the format induces a fantasy of omniscience in the viewer. You’re practically convinced the whole thing is your very own dream.

Creating such a psychological state is an aesthetic landmark only previously approached by Ed Kienholz’s tableaux. That’s a significant achievement, but there’s yet more to Roberts’ work. “Early Programming” uses computer, digitally-generated voice box and TV monitor to broadcast a mini-encyclopedia of admonitions directed at middle-class American kids. The basic sort of “Clean your room,” “Eat your broccoli,” “That book’s too old for you” kind of stuff we think of as commonplace. Roberts’ detachment makes one muse on how bratty we’d look to a Third World viewer.

“Digital Museum” is made up of some half-dozen table-top display cases. Each contains related objects such as casts of human body parts, geometric shapes or animals, plants and minerals. Touched through holes in their plastic boxes, each emits various recorded sentences associated with the object. Touch the lion, for example, and a woman’s voice says her date last night was a beast. Touch a pyramid and you hear a satire of those current phone systems that instruct you to press this or that button to get your party or an order of fries.

Here, I think, Roberts tips her expressive hand. This work is like a cultural time capsule for future anthropologists. It broadcasts a picture of an over-advantaged world where everyone is embroiled in minutia. They spout cliches in flat voices, ignoring both the humor and the profundity of their own utterances. In Roberts’ world, people--including exhibition viewers--think they’re interacting when they actually exist only in self-invented and remarkably unimaginative fantasy.

The assertion raises age-old philosophical questions about the nature of reality and illusion, as fascinating as they are unanswerable. One can, however, stand in wonder at Roberts’ achievement. She’s taken a significant step in creating a convincing virtual reality. At the same instant, she raises responsible doubts about the desirability of living in such a petty, boring place, real or otherwise.

* Art Center College of Design, Williamson Gallery, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena; to July 19. Closed Mondays. (626) 396-2244.