Nicole Stenger

Nicole Stenger
Birth name	Nicole Stenger
Born	Paris, France
Field	New Media Art
Website	http://www.nicolestenger.com/

Nicole Stenger is a French/American artist, pioneer in Virtual Reality and in Web Cinema. In 1989-1991 she was a research Fellow at MIT-CAVS and MIT/Visual Arts Program. In 1991-1992 she was a Visiting Scholar at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (Hitlab) in Seattle.

Early VR works

Between 1989-1992, she created Angels, the first immersive movie. The project foundation was laid out at the Visual Arts Program at MIT, employing Wavefront's Advanced Visualizer on a Silicon Graphics personal IRIS. The VR work was done at the Hitlab (University of Washington) using VPL's Virtualization interface and its Body Electric software running on the IRIS. Angels is a real-time interactive immersive movie, a kind of travel in a virtual paradise. The participant uses a VPL Dataglove and high-resolution HRX goggles developed by Jaron Lanier. Following Tom Furness' theory, the artwork was developed for the three senses: vision, audio and touch, though the technological restraints at the time could only implement vision, audio, and a non tactile data glove. Each user starts his/her experience in front of an odd carousel that is a passage to more VR worlds. Touching one of the three angels’ hearts in the carousel, defines the range in which the following three segments will appear. The duration of the sections varies from just about 30" to 2'30".^[1] The brilliantly colourful environments are a gateway to more scenes. The angels' voices ask the users to interact with them, causing a story to open. The music was composed by Diane Thome. While at MIT, Stenger also contributed to the seminal Cyberspace First Steps edited by Michael L. Benedikt with the now famous essay Mind is a Leaking Rainbow.

Web cinema works

A screenshot from Fauxcinema

In the nineties, after the completion of her VR project, Stenger worked on VRML works and developed online art projects that are early examples of Web Cinema. My Faux Cinema (1998–2003) followed by Love Your Friend (2004) was a project composed of web pages with animated gifs, java applets, open source audio files, textual parts written by Stenger or sampled from the Internet. Faux Films: Fresh! (2000) and Bitchery (2001) are stylistic jokes. They mimic cinema moving images. She also created Web Books: To Dream or Not to Eat (1998), The California Trilogy (1996–2000), Nature (2000), Nanfei in Waspland (2000). A Web Book is a kind of book with a story. It has the look of a book, with a cover, an introduction, a conclusion, and a narrative of seven to twelve pages. Web Books are multimedia works with static and animated text, animated gifs, VRML animation and sound.

Recent works

Stenger’s last works are VRML movies, also conceived for immersion. Chambers (2001), Dynasty (2007–2009). Dynasty is composed of 15 scenes with text by Stenger and music by Tchaikovsky.

Notes

1. ^ Thome,1995, " Reflections on Collaborative Process and Compositional Revolution", Leonardo Music Journal, 5, p. 29.

References

• Popper, Frank, Art of the Electronic Age University of Michigan, (1994) ISBN 0810919281
• Popper, Frank, From Technological to Virtual Art MIT Press, (2007) ISBN 026216230X
• Stenger, Nicole, Mind is a Leaking Rainbow in Michael L. Benedikt (ed), Cyberspace First Steps MIT Press, pp.  48-57, ISBN 026202327X.
• Thome, Diane 5 (1995). «Reflections on Collaborative Process and Compositional Revolution». Leonardo Music Journal: 29-32.

External links

• Nicole Stenger

Persondata
Name	Stenger, Nicole
Alternative names
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Place of birth	Paris, France
Date of death
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