The virtual environment with Matisse's kites
Jackie Matisse watches as a student creates a kite. Photos by Michael Kiernan.
A graduate student project resulted in artist Jackie Matisse’s first visit to the United States. Matisse chose the visit to unveil a new art form — virtual-reality art.
Matisse creates Teflon or crepe kites, with artistic tails as long as 15 feet, that can soar through the air, ripple through water, or undulate with the air currents in a room. For the Virginia Tech visit, she created kites that people could float along within a virtual environment (VE), shown in the top photo at right. Students and the public also helped Matisse (pictured in the second photo at right) create new kites while they waited their turn in the university’s CAVE.
To learn what would be necessary for Matisse’s virtual-reality kites presentation, arts administration major Francis Thompson visited with Matisse at a VE facility in Amsterdam and at her studio in France, talked with Virginia Tech CAVE researcher Ron Kriz and others, and coordinated with Tom Coffin of the Supercomputing Center in Arlington, Va.
Thompson also helped plan future events with Matisse’s virtual-reality works and looked at what groundbreaking elements of the project might be applied in other arenas of the art world. Thompson, who now has his master’s degree, has been the coordinator of Virginia Tech’s Armory Art Gallery exhibitions for two years and has worked at the Cunningham Foundation in New York, which is where he is this summer.
