matthewsloly.com/shimmer/index.html Home | CV | Links | Contact Shimmer 2000 virtual sculpture, located in "VWD" world, in Eduverse, in Activeworlds1 At first sight, Shimmer appears to be a cube with a series of passages leading from each of its six faces into, and offset from, its center. It is a static object, animated by its own unrepresentability, its constituent parts exceeding the maximum number of surfaces that can be rendered at any one time by the Active Worlds 2.0 browser. Its function is therefore derived from its disfunctionality. Its appearance is the result of, and is simultaneous with, it's disappearance. Through this staccato action of veiling to reveal, and revealing to veil, it is possible to glean a gestalt impression of the apparatus that lies behind its appearance. While it explicates the specific limits of the system in which it is formed, the work stems from a more general preoccupation that I have had with the limits of linear representational systems, specifically language. Even though Shimmer is a non local network distributed object, it is formed of geometries that are defined serially, by a mark-up language (a text). So in a very literal way the work is an attempt to address what I see as an inherent blind spot in the scene that language produces. What is more, I am not satisfied for this blind spot to function as merely something "other", lying "beyond the pal" of a given system of representation. Rather, I seek to give this otherness room to act as self-representational agency within the system, without having any ability my self to alter the system in any way, due to the fact that ActiveWorlds is a proprietary VR format. A limit to any system can be made to be productive, and can point to, does point to, and highlights the importance of, such a limit as the place and/or moment where the dialectical contradiction of difference and similarity, has play, has the potential to become, to summon, its own agency. It eliminates and elucidates the construction, the constructedness, of the world, in this case a virtual world, but by implication, a world, as such. 1. Activeworlds is an online multi-user VR format. See: http://www.activeworlds.com/index.asp