Re: 3d meaning & the Semiotics of Cyberspace

Kevin Goldsmith (unitcirc@netcom.com)
Thu, 8 Jun 1995 14:51:10 -0700 (PDT)

> On the other hand, if you eliminate gravity and allow your shapes to
> be of arbitrary size, you are going to have some very interesting user
> access "problems." Small buildings and details will be missed unless
> a person shrinks down to the right size at the right place. If you
> can come at and move through the landscape at any angle, then you will
> be more likely to miss portions of it because there's simply more to
> access. This can be aesthetically stimulating. It can also mean that
> nobody sees your work because it's lost in the confusion of the
> landscape.
>
This is certainly to be taken account of in the design, but
imagine the possibilities of exploiting it. Allowing the artist to
create entire universes the size of a real-life nickel, rewarding the
careful observer with a un-thought of experience missed by all but the
most active viewer.

> Yes. We need some kind of (roughly) common semiotic/signifying system to
> act as a framework for poetic freedom, after all, poetry is much about
> _manipulating_ it's framwork, i.e.. the more rigid framework the more clear
> the deviations and manipulations are.
>
> If there's a "need" for this, it's an engineering need, or a marketing
> need. It is not an artistic need.
>
I agree. I find the lack of a framework to be quite exciting
from an artistic standpoint. I would imagine that with any new art
medium, eventually after much experimentation a framework will develop,
but until that time...

> >From an artistic standpoint, I don't find this nice at all. It's
> anywhere from boring to repressing, depending upon the extent of the
> conventions. "Ho hum, another stupid black world with a few objects
> in it. Don't these guys know anything about color, or are they just
> lazy?" To myself and many others, art is about creation and novelty,
> and not about adherance to "accepted" conventions.
>
I think this is more due to the fact that most of the people
creating these spaces are scientists or engineers and not artists.
Artists are just now really entering the frame. At the moment, some of
their cues are being taken from the engineers, but it won't be very long
until they (we) can transcend this.

Kevin