You do raise a valid point, but a lot of really valid (and groundbreaking)
work can develop as homages to artists in different media. I'm at a loss
to remember the filmmaker who did "Mr. Frenhofer and the Minotaur," (circa
1950, I think) but it's an incredible piece of film made as an homage to a
Balzac story and a Picasso work. It pulls concepts and images from both, and
uses them to create something radically different from any prior work in
film.
The reason Dali and Escher are interesting, at least to me, is that I don't
have a VR system capable of creating detailed interactive worlds (and I
suspect I'm not alone on this list), and these things help me envision
interactive worlds that take a step outside the standard mimesis that
has defined much of the VR work I've seen to date.
>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.)
I agree, this sounds incredible. But I find it difficult to visualize.
I'm sure if someone gave me 10 minutes to play with such a system, I
would have all kinds of ideas for it, but right now, it's too abstract
for me.
>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.
Yes. What I find engaging about a DaliWorld is not rendering the visual
style nearly as much as (1) animating it, giving all of his surreal
creatures this fourth dimension and (2) interacting with it. A static
3D DaliWorld buys you nothing that the 2D doesn't give you.
>-- 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"...
Very cool. If the bandwidth were there for the updates, I'd love to work
on CGI programs that could do this with current VRML.
>-- 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.
Sounds like the old story about what Jaron Lanier was trying to do with
VPL.
>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...
Yes, and one of the ways they will be developed is through people moving
between media. Imagine what choreographers might come up with if not bound
by ordinary laws of physics. Imagine what 3D music videos will look (and
sound?) like.
And so on.
--Andy
andyn@texas.net