2004OP_ERA: Haptic Interface

OP_ERA: HAPTIC INTERFACE is a space in which a body learns to fly through an equation. The equation is the Lorenz attractor; a system of three nonlinear differential equations published by the meteorologist Edward Lorenz in 1963, originally written to model the convection of air in the atmosphere. The attractor's solutions never repeat and never settle. They produce a four-dimensional figure that resembles a butterfly, drifting and switching between two helical lobes. The attractor became the founding image of chaos theory: small differences in initial conditions producing radically divergent outcomes. The weather, in three lines of mathematics.

The visitor stands in front of a large projection screen. In the original 2004 version, the visitor wore a data glove. Closing one finger sent the visitor traveling, in real time and at high speed, along one of the helical loops of the attractor. Closing all five fingers pulled the image closer; opening them pushed it away. The fingers were not controllers — they were the visitor's coordinates inside the four-dimensional system. To bend a finger was to be somewhere else in the equation.

Where Hyperviews, made the same year, asks the visitor to imagine a four-dimensional object through retinal afterimage, HAPTIC INTERFACE asks the visitor to inhabit one through the hand. The two works are companions: one operates by the eye's incompleteness, the other by the body's reach. Both treat the four-dimensional not as a space to be visualized but as a space to be entered.

The work has been built twice. The 2004 version used a wired data glove with finger-closure sensors, calibrated each time the visitor put it on. The 2011 version, developed for sustained museum installation, replaced the glove with a Kinect motion-tracking system. The visitor's whole body became the controller: stepping toward the screen zoomed in, stepping back zoomed out, opening both arms launched the visitor over the attractor, opening one arm switched lines. Same equation, different body. What persists is the relation: the human in front of the four-dimensional figure, learning to move inside it.