I have to say, I think that adapting existing works of art to this new
medium is going to be a near-total aesthetic failure. Different media
really do call for different approaches, and although VR may *look*
sorta like painting, it's really *very* different. Doing a subtle
homage is one thing; doing a true adaptation of style is likely to
fall flat.
Given the ideas I've heard so far, I find the Dali/Escher adaptations
wildly unexciting. (And I am a *big* fan of both.) The Star Wars
notion has *some* potential, although I suspect that it's going to
ride somewhere on the line between "art" and "entertainment" (which
may or may not be the same thing, depending on your definitions).
The ideas that *really* turn me on are, for instance, the ones with
the abstract forms that respond to the user. (The biofeedback rooms
are an extraordinarily cool idea, the first really *innovative* idea
I've heard yet, and one of the first that sounds like something I'd
be interested in playing with for more than a minute.)
Play with this stuff some more, and really explore. The best works
of art have always come from breaking new ground, and figuring out
what the medium can really do. VR doesn't just add 3-dimensionality;
if that was all it did, we'd just be reinventing sculpture. What VR
*really* buys you is *involvement*. Create works of art that respond
to the user in various ways. Create works that are dynamic, in a
thousand different ways. (Since this list is for soi-distant dreaming,
I think it's fair to assume that we will have solved the behaviour
issues.)
Here are two potential ideas for esoteric "art", just to get the
juices flowing:
-- An entire class of projects: AI-based people and objects, that respond
to the user's actions, not always in the ways they expect. There is a
lot of potential in carrying the whole Eliza/Parry idea through, but
*not* trying to win the Turing Test -- instead, creating objects that
are "intelligent" in strange and new ways. Then, put a collection of
these pseudo-intelligent things together in a room, reacting to the
user and each other. Hell, if we're dreaming, imagine a whole worldlet
of these things, to which anyone can contribute new "lifeforms"...
-- The computer equivalent of mechanical art: put the user *inside* a
computer program. Attach, say, a C interpreter to a set of formalisms
about what a program "looks" like. Put the user into that. Think about
the notion of program as pinball machine, with the user as the ball.
Or as an ecosphere that the user can explore. Or something else; there
are lots of different formalisms you could develop, and once you've
developed those, you've got a nearly infinite number of programs to
plug into them...
The point is: innovate. Regurgitations of 2-D art are going to be
curiosities, nothing more. But the potential of this medium is greater
than perhaps any before it. Surely we can come up with a thousand
genuinely *new* ways to use it...
-- Justin
Who is genuinely surprised to find that he
has something to say on this topic...
Random Quote du Jour:
Re: Code-design tools
"Given automated support for any notation, one of the things that tools
can do is to help bad designers create ghastly designs much more quickly
than they ever could in the past."
-- Grady Booch