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Charlotte Adele Davies, PhD, Class of 1973, lives in a
log cabin in Quebec’s Eastern Townships surrounded
by a thousand acres of forest. No kids. Four horses.
And bears.
While her work as an artist and public speaker has
taken her around the world, it is this particular wild
place – forest, rock ledges, streams and enveloping
horizon – that is the basis for her work. Though she is
recognized as a pioneer in the field of virtual reality,
Char produces art which draws attention to the world
of nature by using technology to enable others to
perceive it freshly, beyond their habitual everyday
assumptions.
Char’s beginnings as an artist relate to her eyesight
(myopic) and her early need for glasses. Without them,
she sees a world without objects, where there is only a
soft, luminous and voluminous space.
“This has truly been a gift, because it offered a way
for me to understand and be in the world differently,”
she explains. The desire to communicate this
difference became a driving force in her work.
Char began her career as a painter, making 2-D
images. In the mid-1980s, her interest in accessing a
“virtual” space on the other side of the picture-plane
led to her involvement in building a software company.
Softimage became an international leader in the field
of 3-D computer graphics and was purchased by
Microsoft in 1994.
Char worked with technologies associated with
virtual reality, or what she prefers to call “immersive
virtual space.” This led to the creation of Osmose in
1995, a fully immersive, interactive virtual environment.
Participants wore a stereoscopic head-mounted
display and a vest which tracked their breathing and
balance, enabling them to seemingly float and interact
within the 3-D virtual space. Osmose became world-
renowned for its powerful emotional effects. It is
considered a landmark in the history of new media art.
Creating in 3-D virtual space taught Char to
conceptualize spatially, in-the-round. This led to
her current work in progress, which encompasses
the actual and the virtual. In the same forest which
inspired Osmose, she is creating actual landscapes
with trees, earth, water and stone. She is also
capturing these elements with 3-D laser scanners
and, with her team, is developing custom3-D software
to communicate her vision of the forest as perpetual
transformation. At the same time, she is working
to restore and preserve this forest, protecting it in
perpetuity from future development.
Char remembers her Havergal experience as an
opportunity to think of herself “first and foremost as
a person, who happened to be female.” It allowed her
to escape the world of brothers and male cousins in
which, as the girl, she was treated differently.
While Char’s art-making is “essentially a solitary
conversation I’m having with the universe,” she is
also deeply motivated by the desire to communicate
– saying, “Hey, look! Isn’t this wonderful? Isn’t it
extraordinary to be alive, among All This?”
A virtual visionary
CHARLOTTE ADELE (CHAR) DAVIES 1973
Profile by Dr. Suzanne Stiegelbauer
PROFILES
Suzanne Stiegelbauer taught at Havergal from 1971 to 1976.