That is an interesting test question. I'll have to think about that
one.
The point of a lot of Surrealistic devices in Dali's work, I think, is
to erase the notion that you can even categorize the semantic
distances into some measureable framework. Or to avoid such easy
links, in many cases. I believe that's what he meant by "concrete
irrationality."
Here's a good quote from that book of mine:
His imagery has, nevertheless, an irrefutable sense. A journalist
once asked him why he had painted Gala with two raw chops on her
shoulder and he replied, "I love chops and I love my wife, I can see
no reason why I should not paint them together." Dali arrived
straightaway at this dialectic of the absurd and maintained it in all
his pictures. [HAZA 85]
One thing I've noticed, is that for me, the Surrealist illusion
breaks down when Dali just paints a bunch of objects having sex with
each other. Well, maybe it doesn't completely break down - a melting
skull sodomizing a piano is still pretty strange. But the easy
refererences to sexual intercourse destroy a lot of the mystery for
me. You start thinking, "Oh, I get it, it's about sex," which is a
creative concept that any grade schooler can arrive at. This would
seem to be a case of the semantic bridge between subject matter and
audience understanding to be very, very short.
Perhaps it's because I'm a liberally-minded person. Maybe if I was
more conservative in my outlook, the mere suggestion of sex in a
painting would set off a much greater cognitive dissonance?
> Then fill it with cauliflower.
I like that a lot :)
Thank Dali for it, not me. Apparently at some lecture he gave, Dali
arrived in a Rolls Royce filled with cauliflowers.
A final thought. It would seem that one could fill a VR universe with
arbitrary objects, and that an audience would then try to make sense
of it all. The question is: do these objects have enough semantic
distance, that the audience can be prevented from getting an "easy
read," as in my complaint about objects rutting with each other?
And what does such an approach have to say about CONTENT in a VR
universe?
Cheers,
Brandon