Art as Reality

Today's post is on: the ultimate human interactivity with art. The matrix is here, people - in this complete artificial ecosystem with which people interact just by the act of viewing it:

Time Of Doubles
Interactive digital installation by Haru Ji & Graham Wakefield;
Image from: Media Arts & Technology Program, UCSB
(original image is HERE)

My suggestion: first, watch this YouTube video, which gives you a taste of the interactive experience. Here's my feeble attempt to put it into words: in the center of this room is a curved-panel video display that shows a kind of virtual "aquarium". When you walk into the room, your presence is shown in the aquarium as a sort of "energy being" that throws off swirling threads of light. These threads are consumed by microbeetles, which are in turn consumed by bigger (blue) snake-shaped lifeforms. The snake-forms constantly swim around and form fluid boundaries which shift as people interact within the aquarium [if you really want one, a more detailed verbal description can be found HERE; more amazing still images of the installation are available HERE]. The installation is currently up at the SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 show in Hong Kong, and it looks VERY cool.

If your brain isn't too fried now, watch the video again - this time paying attention to the people walking around and looking at the screen. Most of them seem to take a little while to realize they're IN the aquarium, a little longer to see that they're interacting with it, and a bit longer still to take in that they're an active part of this self-contained ecosystem. By the act of walking into the room, they've become full-fledged participants in a completely artificial world. As Neo so clearly articulated it, "Whoa ... !"

Neo learns Kung Fu in The Matrix
(© Warner Brothers; original image is HERE)

So what? Well, the piece actually fits into this thread I've recently been writing about the role of art with respect to what we call "life". It can document life; it can "imitate" life. It can affect life; it can be affected by life (as in yesterday's posting on the Japanese-American painters whose artistic lives were effectively erased by events). It can help one contemplate life, even in the abstract (the minimalist painter John McLaughlin once said: "I want to communicate only to the extent that the painting will serve to induce or intensify the viewer's natural desire for contemplation, without the benefit of a guiding principle"). 

In today's posting, I see that it can actually create an other-universe life outside of what we call life: the UCSB project which resulted in this "Time Of Doubles" work is titled "Artificial Nature". Yeah, it's software-generated; sure, our eyes see it via pixels on a screen rather than via light reflected off of physical objects; of course, the software is created by human programmers - and I would argue that NONE of those considerations make it anything less than a "real life". It's an environment with rules, structure and sentient creatures that interact with it - and with each other - just by BEING THERE. You know - just like the one we currently call home.

Now, hard-core Gamers might argue they've been living in such worlds for years, in Second Life, Entropia and countless other virtual worlds - and I'd almost agree with them. Dude, they've even got their own money in there! Still, those are mostly based on kind-of-familiar rules of interaction (okay, maybe not true for Portal, which has its own special laws of physics), and you DO need a specific human/screen interface, like a keyboard, controller or joystick. Wii, xBox Kinect and other systems with motion-sensing interfaces are coming ever-closer to what I'm talking about, I guess. Whatever. My point is the same: you interact with, and enter the environment of, this Time Of Doubles installation piece just by the act of viewing it.

Whoa ... !
***************

Today's creation is: the near-final version of a popup insert for this year's Christmas card. It's about 4" tall, and a composite of two colored ink pieces (tree + star) over a background I photographed last week at the local train station (village tree is there). Here are the image itself and the 3-D version that will go inside the card:

tree image [© me]

popup tree [© me]

I'm finally happy with it, and so is Kristin. Now to finalize the text to go inside the card (she does beautiful calligraphy) and start printing. At least 4 trips out for inks, I'm guessing. Oh, well - the design is done - almost.