The longer I stare at Dali's work, the more I realize that axial
explanations of semantic distance are totally unnecessary. Dali's
work is simpler than all that. Usually what he's doing is giving the
viewer some "plot devices" to peruse, which suggest that some form of
narrative is going on. The viewer then mentally tries to turn the
picture into a narrative, and the Surrealism comes from the obvious
discontinuity of the plot line. I think it is the struggle to resolve
and make sense of the discontinuities of an image, which gives rise to
Surrealist experience. The imagination is stretched and new
inferences about reality are deduced.
For example, Dali populates most of his works with human figures, and
frequently these figures are posted as though they are talking to each
other. Their body postures will indicate fear, dejection, grief,
desire, sexual arousal, violent intent, etc. All of these features
indicate that a drama is occurring, ala Hollywood "sex, violence, and
soap opera."
The physical landscape is also often set up like a stage. Quite often
the ground is just a flat plane leading to an essentially featureless
back wall. To be sure, the stage is often huge because of distant
mountains, tiny figures, and atmospheric perspective. But it's still
fundamentally a stage, with a collection of props upon it. Sometimes
the stage metaphor is explicit, as in "The Old Age of William Tell."
Here a couple of pedestals hold up a cloth, which functions as a
curtain for the naked actors in dialogue behind it.
In much the same way that Hollywood will hand us an assault rifle or a
breaking pane of glass, Dali hands us a number of recurrent symbols
as plot devices. These become self-contained "widgets" for telling
stories: drop them into a picture, and you have the basic material for
a narrative.
For example, Dali frequently makes use of "the crutch" to prop up
objects in his scenes. Usually the crutch is responsible for holding
up tremendously imbalanced objects that would surely topple over were
the crutch not there, and probably _should_ fall over even with the
crutch there to support them. The gravitational metaphor of
instability becomes a mental metaphor of paraoic state, the fear that
reality doesn't hold together well and the entire universe will come
crashing down around you.
The melting watch is another plot device which appears over and over
and over again. It is a self-contained narrative: it marks the
ephemerality of the passing of time. That's basically what narrative
is: marking the passing of time.
Keys appear in several of his paintings. A key indicates that there's
a lock somewhere - a mystery to be solved. In "The Fountain" it would
seem that the keys somehow hold the answer to why the fountain is
asleep, or why the witch's head is drinking from a bloody cup, or why
there are swords lying about. It's a murder mystery, a dream mystery.
There are a lot of symbols which can be analyzed similarly as standard
plot devices. Ants = decay and infestation, the sleepy down-turned
face with the big nose = dream state, the oversized hand = a beckoning
to enter the unconscious realm. The grasshopper symbol is interesting
because it has a personal rather than a public meaning: Dali claimed
to be afraid of grasshoppers.
So what's the moral of all of this, for VR purposes?
If you take symbols and situations that people recognize, and simply
abut them together, you will get Surrealist experience. The viewer
will start from the base of the well-known or the partially-known, and
extrapolate to the unknown narrative that interconnects the standard
plot elements. People will do this because they like to dream, they
like to be told stories, and they like to feel that they are being
told a story.
This would suggest that computer-generated Surrealist storytelling is
possible. One needs to manually come up with a sufficient body of
interesting symbols, and then devise algorithms which will present and
rearrange those symbols for the viewer. The "art" in such an
endeavor, would be to create algorithms which direct the viewer's
symbolic construction process in an interesting way.
Such algorithms bring us naturally into the discussion of _chance_ in
the Surrealist process. What role should chance play? What is its
aesthetic value? It is important to note that this topic was heatedly
debated throughout the history of Surrealism. Early Surrealism
advocated a complete abandonment of methodical approach; chance was
king. However, Andre Breton indicates in his essay "What is
Surrealism?" that later Surrealist theory was no longer adverse
to method, and that the sheer reliance on chance more properly
belonged to Dada, the art movement from which Surrealism sprang.
The essay "What is Surrealism?" is available at
<http://cordelia.fnal.gov/~romosan/surrealism.html>. It's a very
long-winded account of the history of Surrealism with regards to the
politics of the times. If you're looking for ideas about how to build
a Surrealist virtual world, don't look here. You'll be bored silly,
and I've done you the favor of summarizing the thrust of the essay.
For those of us who are interested in Surrealism and the possibility
of computer algorithms, I think we need to read up on the theories of
the latter-day Surrealists. I haven't done so yet, but I suspect they
are most likely to yield techniques of practical value to VR world
construction. If anyone finds some essays that do a good job of this,
please post the references.
A good place to start might be the Surrealist home page:
<http://pharmdec.wustl.edu/juju/surr/surrealism.html>
Cheers,
Brandon