Ah. Ye olde definitions problemo. Please allow me to introduce my
parlance. "Artist" == someone who creates virtual worlds. "User" ==
someone who walks around in virtual worlds. These domains could
overlap, or they could be kept separate. I don't see any moral
imperative to do one or the other - they are just different
approaches. I leave the issues of authorial control to some kind of
negotiation between artist and audience.
I thought the purpose of this discussion was to come up with the
"tools" that will allow anyone (user/artist) to create their own
virtual world.
I'd say the purpose of this list is broader than that. It is to discuss
the possibilities of VR art, free of technical constraint. As for the
Surrealist discussion - my purpose is to discuss possible techniques.
I don't care how they are applied, or who applies them.
If all we are talking about just providing a finished
piece of "art" then it would seem we are debating the wrong issues?
Not in my opinion. Art doesn't have to be technologically interactive
for a user to mentally interact with a piece. That has been sort of
my point: users will generate their own internal mental narratives
about a given work of art, whether you want them to or not. You can
try to influence their cognitive process, if you're into that sort of
thing. Or you can just give them clouds to look at, and let them draw
their own conclusions.
Wouldn't it be better to be providing a system that supplies all of
the tools *any user* can utilise to create a surreal world? After
all, I may not like yours :-)
Sure, if such a thing were possible. There are only so many
programmer hours, and good artists will want to differentiate
themselves and invent their own approaches anyways. This seems to
have more to do with the politics of freeware vs. commercial software
distribution than anything else.
If however we are trying to create a system that is a set of tools,
then we need not worry about whether it is to be changed and by whom,
but rather is such a thing possible?
It is technologically possible. You just create some kind of shared
resource and security system.
This all comes back to the politics of distributed authorship - which
to me is a totally tangential discussion to that of Surrealism as
we've been developing it. Because Surrealism relies on a user's
mental process to create the linkages and make a story out of what the
user sees, there is no correct "script" to follow. I think authorial
control is much more important, as an aesthetic issue, when you're
trying to re-create something like Hamlet. In such a scenario, there
_is_ a "correct" version of events, and extending those events to
encompass multiple story paths and user interactions is much more of a
challenge. I think for some kinds of works, these challenges will
ultimately have to be faced. It seems that Surrealism is the easy way
out - let the user do all the storytelling work!
Cheers,
Brandon