>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 isn't much different from some types of experimental film work:
if you are really editing a film frame-by-frame (or several times a
second), only people who view your film through an editor can see
everything. OTOH, presenting too much information for people to
effectively absorb can be very compelling to a viewer who is
always able to find more detail wherever he looks. Of course, it
can fail to work too....
> It's nice to see that there already is a V-World 'look' developing,
> identifiable metaphors like black background, infinite grids, clear
> colours, etc. Some are a result of technology, some just notions of 'what
> it should look like'.
>
>>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.
Fortunately, the history of art is pretty much one artist or group getting
so popular that they set an "accepted" style, then someone else coming
and tearing it down to build something totally different. If every
engineer and marketing analyst in the world agree on a common
landscape for cyberspace, that just leaves more room for artists to do
something different.
--Andy