> I know this may be a bit painful to some of you art majors ;-), but how
> would you describe Dali and his interpretation of things, if you were
> going to build an algorythm for "Dali-izing" say, a Buick?
>
>Auto-sodomize it with a melting skull. Then fill it with cauliflower.
>I am dead serious, this is what you'd do to "Dali-ize" it.
Not exactly like writing a Van Gogh algorithm, is it? ;)
[Comments on excerpts from a terrific discussion of Dali]
> In the context of a VR
> tribute to the man, can someone name off a few more of the
> characteristics of a Dali algorythm?
>
>Visually speaking, 3d morphing of posed human figures would accomplish a
>lot. I think a lot of his work perverts the ideals of Greco-Roman
>statuary.
Yes. See also DeChirico on that one. Actually, on the use of space in
landscapes, too.
>What's remarkable is that somehow he makes these planar worlds feel
>"full," yet he doesn't use all that many objects to accomplish this.
>I think if you had the freedom to move at will around these scenes in
>3d, the illusion would fall apart. You'd wind up with the typical VR
>problem of feeling like "Oh boy, here I am in this great, big, empty
>universe with a couple of stupid objects in the center of it."
I think what you'd want to do is to keep the ratio of objects to space
about the same, but fill a larger space, so there are dozens of objects.
You might want to make the ground a sphere of radically smaller size than
a planet, so that new objects could appear on the horizon more quickly as
you move in a different direction. (Or, this might not work at all).
>I perused a book of Dali's work for 2 hours this evening. Visually, I
>think I have a clue about what's going on with him. But as far as
>trying to make _stories_ out of his work, I haven't really even begun
>to think about it. Probably one needs to read some Surrealist
>manifestos to understand what's going on, story-wise. A lot of
>Surrealism was aimed at the process of destroying narrative as we know
>it, and substituting automatic, subconscious processes instead.
The film "Un Chien Andalou" (by Dali and Bunuel) gives some idea of
what a Dalian "narrative" might look like--radically disjointed, like
the narratives of dreams, with a great number of symbolic objects and
actions (ants crawling out of the hole in the hand, the famous shot of
slicing the eyeball). Still, I don't know that narrative is the ideal
way to approach it.
>So chew on what kind of a VR experience this would imply.
>Also, would the guy who said that doing Dali would "not be original"
>please go back to the drawing board. :-)
Overall, I would tend to see a Dalian world as less like a narrative of
any sort, and more populated by "events" that occurred whenever you walked
into them, and depended on how the user reacted. They would likely involve
something like the "life forms" that Justin brought up that didn't act like
people, but responded to events in their own esoteric manner.
This is one of the most important things that a surrealist virtual world
would get you that a surrealist 3D movie wouldn't (even an immersive one).
A completely non-linear narrative structure is something that more
multimedia artists are going to figure out how to leverage in the next
several years, and it feeds perfectly into surrealism.
--Andy
andyn@texas.net