Explore a virtual Berlin Wall at 911 Media Arts

Imagine if your map of Seattle ended at the same place your neighborhood does. If, for instance, your parents live in the University District, but when trying to plan a trip there from Capitol Hill, you realize it's impossible: Nothing is charted beyond the Montlake Bridge. What's past that border is marked on your map as a color field. A no man's land.

Unbelievable as it seems, citizens of the former East Berlin actually had some version of this experience throughout the Cold War. That's one of the aspects of the Berlin Wall that's illuminated in an intriguing installation at 911 Media Arts Center. Another is that, despite the fact it was destroyed 20 years ago, the edifice — which separated communist East Germany and democratic West Germany from 1961 to 1989 — still exists as a sort of "Wall of the Mind" which affects both Berliners and visitors in interesting psychological ways.

Seattle-raised, Munich-based artist and engineer Tamiko Thiel remembers the wall as "surreal" during her visits in the 1980s — and for some visitors, a little underwhelming. She recalls her sister, a history graduate from Yale, exclaiming, "It's not that tall!" and notes how the actual thing didn't convey "what a huge barrier it was, and what it meant to people stuck on one side or the other."

Thiel and her longtime friend Teresa Rueter, a Berlin-based architect, created the 3-D virtual reality installation "Virtuelle Mauer: ReConstructing the Wall" (the title comes from "Berliner Mauer," the German name for the barrier). Thiel is known for her virtual reality work — the kind that powers interactive computer worlds like Second Life — and uses the medium to "give an intellectual and emotional idea of what it was like to live near the wall."

A virtual experience of the wall is constructed here through a composite of materials from the 1960s through the present day. Aerial photography and architectural records of each time period mesh with citizens' personal stories to give an evolving overview of a 1km (2/3 mile) section of the barrier. For example, using the joystick connected to a steel box — the only thing present in the gallery besides the life-size projection in front of you — visitors can either trigger an anecdote on an attempted escape from East Berlin, or be catapulted over the wall for a then-coveted view of the other side.

You can choose to stroll along the West Wall, with its endless facade of colorful graffiti, and through a "time travel" feature, you may find yourself transported back to how it looked in the '60s. You might even find yourself magically on the austere other side, the Hinterland Wall. The ambient sounds of vehicles, children, birds, or German military officers accompany different scenes as you wander. Getting disoriented is a given.

Thiel anticipated this. "The wall did make a 360-degree circle, so sometimes the East is North of the West! We have a map that shows that it didn't run North and South and clearly divides East and West, but it encircles," she says.

"The true experience of the wall included this feeling of disorientation, because you couldn't figure it out. With people trying to find traces of it in present-day Berlin, the disorientation is even stronger ... that's part of the game aspect of the piece also. It's not pedagogical. It's 'not Berlin Wall 101,' the A-Z of the Berlin Wall. In essence, it's a game where we provide you with a fair amount of information and you have to take it and go into the space and really look."

Thiel used similar principles in the fantastical "The Travels of Mariko Horo," which exhibited at 911 last October. It also dealt with the ways East and West — in a global context — consider each other. 911 communications director Rob Hyman is enthusiastic about the possibilities of the medium, which are expressed so well in Thiel's work.

"Everyone thinks of digital media as only auditory, but it can get you to move and use more senses," says Hyman.