2003OP_ERA: A Journey

OP_ERA: A JOURNEY is the work that took OP_ERA off the stage and into the cube. Where the 2001 original confined the audience to a theater seat watching a single dancer perform across projected screens, A JOURNEY is the first OP_ERA work in which the visitor is the interactor. The stage disappears; the cube takes its place.

The cube is real — the Caverna Digital at the Laboratório de Sistemas Integrados of the Universidade de São Paulo, the most advanced virtual-reality CAVE in Latin America at the time. Five projection screens form the inner walls of a room. The visitor enters wearing stereoscopic glasses and carrying a wireless mouse. Custom software, written by Victor Gomes e Marcio Cabral, then guides the visitor across four-dimensional regimes in sequence:
The work begins in dimension one. A linear world — linescape — invisible, experienced only as sound. The composers Denise Garcia and Ignácio de Campos created an octophonic real-time soundscape in which the visitor's perception depends entirely on their position in space.

Then dimension two: the flatscape. A finite, bounded plane the visitor can move across — north, south, east, west — drawing geometric figures with their motion. The sensation, as Machado writes, is of becoming a citizen of Edwin Abbott's Flatland, the 1884 novel of a two-dimensional world inhabited by two-dimensional beings.

Then dimension three: the cube itself. The space becomes an empty box, and inside the box three forms — a green triangle, a red square, a blue circle — execute a mathematical ballet, recalling Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet of 1922. When the visitor's body enters the spatial scheme, choreographic algorithms respond: the figures change plane, change direction, change behavior.

Then the fourth dimension: a Lorenz attractor. The visitor becomes a single point inside the attractor's helical loops, and the events that occurred in the lower dimensions begin to determine what happens in this higher one. There is no predetermined trajectory. What unfolds is shaped by what the visitor did in dimension one, in dimension two, in dimension three.

A JOURNEY is the founding architecture of every OP_ERA work that follows. The cube. The single visitor. The mathematics-as-room. The body as the agent through which the work happens.