If there's a "need" for this, it's an engineering need, or a marketing
need. It is not an artistic need.
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.
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I agree with Brandon here, such conventions are really only "defaults",
ie, solutions to superficial questions about a "look and feel" that
Virtual Locations "should" have.
Such literal metaphors run the risk of prematurely limiting/freezing the
framework which Poetry functions to challenge and manipulate.
With any medium, new or old, it is the ability of the artist to identify
and manipulate (heighten, distort etc,) the particular qualities which are
unique to that media,the characteristics which differentiate that medium
from others,that results in what I might call "aesthetic progress", or
"good art".
Until photography, painting was the medium with the greatest authority to
recreate appearance. It could "visualize" realistic spaces and objects, and
with the help of empirical observation, chromatic and perspectival "codes"
developed.In terms of veracity a Painting was second only to the image on
one's own retina. Painting itself was the master of description, of
re-presentation. Photography then forced Painting to deal with the question
of what it is TO PAINT, what it means to make images with paint,it was
nolonger simply enough to wonder "what is it that I should paint?, what
should I describe?",the artist must ask "what is it to describe, how does
my chosen medium of description effect translation, what terms are beyond
translation by this medium, and which terms are uniquely translatable by
it?
The question then is "what do VR Worlds do that nothing else does?", and
hence why are we using them and what for?
So I hope we all agree that VR worlds are not "about" screen colours or
backgrounds.Their uniqueness lies in their ability to simulate and invent
space/time environments, and they do this with a language which is an
expanding hybrid of established forms. Forms which I would loosely
characterise with terms such as:
Navigation- Where am I? How do I know this? Where have I been? Where might I go?
Transport - How do I move? Are there limits to this motion? Do other things
move?
Relativity- How fast/slow is this reality? Can I access other realities
from this one? Is there a Meta-Reality?
etc,etc
These terms are provisional,and its obviously not an exhaustive list, but i
hope it serves to make a point.I guess my hunch at this stage is that
discussion/identification of what might be called "The Unique
Characteristics of Virtual Worlds" might provide a valuable conceptual
basis for developing our discussion,and without running the risk of it
being pre-scriptive or didactic.I do not envisage its function as a
framework or boundary within which things might occur; but rather as a
surface, a ground or support upon, and from which, things may grow.I
suspect that similar conceptual cues (when complex enough) rarely result in
similar images. But who knows? Maybe we'll all end up under the tyranny of
the Infinite Grid? See ya round, Martin.