The best way to change that, would be to go to your local library and
get a book of his work.
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.
During his Surrealist period, Dali defined his work as "instantaneous,
hand-painted photography of superfine, extravagant, extraplastic,
extrapictorial, unexplored, superpictorial, superplastic, deceptive,
hypernormal, debile images of concrete irrationality."
What makes
it Dali? I am painfully ignorant of the finer asthetics of the work.
>From what I've seen so far, it would be this melting,
Dali certainly did a lot of things that melt. Also a lot of things
with holes in them. Most of the time this happens on a very big, very
flat, planar landscape, with a bunch of really large figures and a few
teeny-tiny figures to show off the size of the really large figures.
garishly colored interpretation of the object,
I don't know about that. Dali is usually garish in form, rather than
color.
usually objects related to time in some
way, but I know it goes deeper than that.
You are probably thinking of the melting watches in "The Persistence
of Memory." Although it's arguably his most famous work, and the
"melting watch" appears in many of his other works, it is far from the
only emblem that he uses over and over again. Some other objects
repeated in many of his works: grasshoppers, crutches, eggs,
hermaphrodites, drawers, ants, and crosses, to name a few.
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.
Also, you could use the planar landscape / size contrast idea.
I think this device was probably common to a number of Surrealist
landscape painters; Yves-Tanguey comes to mind [am I butchering that
name?] Shadows are usually used to indicate the ground plane, but
they don't necessarily have to all point in the same direction, nor do
they have to be terribly accurate. The background colors are somewhat
arbitrary but almost always suggest an atmospheric perspective, with
colors becoming much lighter and more neutral as they approach the
horizon. Usually there's something like a teeny mountain at the
horizon, to establish the horizion line and suggest great distance.
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 he gets around the problem in a couple of ways. One is that
since it's a 2d painting, he's controlling your perspective and the
composition of the objects. Another is the coloration of the ground
plane: somehow the variations in color contribute to the illusion of
atmospheric depth. It's as though we read the colors as an implicit
form of landscape. Or maybe it's just breaking the ground plane into
"front, middle, back" and the mind fills in the transition. Maybe
that amounts to the same thing as landscape. In any event, we could
probably learn a lot from Surrealist planar devices. Somehow they
make sparse worlds seem a lot less empty.
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.
Here's a good quote from the Dali book I've got:
Dali seized on the guiding principles of Surrealism and gave them
their most extreme interpretation; he transformed its interest in the
revelations of the unconscious and psychopathological states into a
way of living and thinking. He invented the "paranoiac-critical
system," a real delirium of organised interpretation, which consisted
of cultivating his hallucinations and putting himself into a state of
feigned madness in order to create without losing his lucidity. "The
only difference between a madman and me is that I am not mad," Dali
declared. All his phobias - the phobia about taking an underground
train, the phobia about a space behind his back, panic fear in front
of a booking-office window, a telephone or a grasshopper - and all his
obsessions were flaunted in his behaviour and his work and
demonstrated that the artist, for the same reasons as a child, was a
"polymorphous pervert," who was not responsible for his instincts.
[Fernard Hazan. _Dali_. Jean Mussot, Paris, 1985.]
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. :-)
I'll see if I can dig up some online Dali works, for those of you
without libraries. But I think a library is probably your best bet.
Cheers,
Brandon