Legendarni film WAX or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees Davida Blaira bio je prvi film stvoren za gledanje na internetu (ranih devedesetih) i općenito indie filmski fenomen. Nakon gotovo 20 godina Blair uskoro izlazi s duhovnim nasljednikom, filmom The Telepathic Motion Picture of The Lost Tribes. Telepatski filmovi! Predivno, uvijek sam mislio da je to jedini pravi medij.
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DAVID BLAIR’S TELEPATHIC CINEMA – Exclusive on “WAX” Sequel
by JC GonzoIn 1993, David Blair debuted his feature WAX or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees online, making it the first film to be transmitted on the internet. Pulling from actual New Mexican locations and natural wonders, Blair distorted reality and created a faux-history that blurred perceptive lines in a way that merged technology and psychology. WAX over the years has become a cyberpunk keystone and is still viewable online in an ever-evolving interactive experience at WAXWEB.
Since WAX, Blair has been relatively quiet. An occasional short film would emerge, but nothing feature length. Blair’s works post-WAX share themes of telepathy, pilgrimage, and lost tribes of a distant past. These shorts were installed at various video art festivals since 1994, and now Blair considers them sketches for a much larger endeavor – a spiritual sequel to WAX – titled The Telepathic Motion Picture of The Lost Tribes. He has recently released a precursory film entitled Finding the Telepathic Cinema of Manchuria, giving a sneak peek into the highly anticipated Lost Tribes world.
Release for The Lost Tribes is still TBA, although Blair’s updates have become increasingly frequent over the last few months. Stay up to date on the new project at Telepathic Movie. I sent Blair a few questions via e-mail. Here is the response:
Recording and communication devices such as the camera – motion or still – captures actuality, but faces the criticism of its validity. Your work shows these technological tools as vessels and portals for human perception, and the conversation of “actuality” or “truth” expands. As cinema centers around simulated perception, but still rings as a true experience, so can memory. Do you use memory the same way your characters use technology?
David Blair: Well, simply put, making a movie is always difficult balance between tools of memory and memory itself, at the level of technique, and composition. Adding to the difficulty is the fact that memory and memory tools resemble each the other, and both are really different. Throw in dreams, which resist memory, and you end up in a sort of 4th dimension of description.
Now, whether I use memory the same way my characters use technology… well, I think the best thing to do is to point to what I’m currently working on: http://telepathic-movie.org/place , which is a writing through of 20 years of thoughts and themes I’ve collected for what I’m calling the sequel to my first movie, “WAX or the discovery of television among the bees” [1991]. It is a way to remember and render memorable [for me] aspects of the real or imaginary world I’ve assembled for “The Telepathic Motion Picture of THE LOST TRIBES” [that's the name of the sequel], in preparation for a movie rendering of it. Blogs are kind of like filmstrips, take the above as a sort of reversed movie.
We hear in FINDING THE TELEPATHIC CINEMA OF MANCHURIA that films are made for movietalkers, not vis versa. This reminds me of the Benshi tradition. Do you follow a similar practice for yourself; creating the visual aspect before allowing the verbal narrative to take shape? Do you see yourself as a modern-day Benshi?
David Blair: The description is directly taken from the benshi tradition [e.g http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benshi not a great entry however ]. They stood by the side of the screen and told the story of the movie as it played. Most lost their jobs when sound came in. Many of these unemployed became kamishibai presenters [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamishibai ], telling stories of painted pre-manga card stories they presented from bicycle-mounted theatres… there were so many of these in post-war Japan that television, when it came in, was apparently known as denki kamishibai, or electric kamishibai. In my um story, benshi in colonial Manchuria control the new studios there, and to stave off their own extinction, make sure to invent a type of telepathic narration.
As for me, yes I like to narrate, I like to see words give form to movies and the reverse.
Some believe projected film reels induces a subconscious hypnosis through the flicker effect that simulates motion. I’ve heard this cited as an argument against digital cinema. As a videographer how do you feel hypnosis (or the broader idea of subconscious viewership) can be achieved?
David Blair: I would think that hypnosis, like many things, including interpretation, depends on the will of the spectator, and those most likely to be hypnotized are probably trying to figure out how to do it to themselves with the help of others, either present, or embodied in frame rates, etc.
As ethereal as your work can be, it centers around very physical realities and geography. WAX OR THE DISCOVERY OF TELEVISION AMONG THE BEES frequents various historical and practical sites scattered throughout New Mexico: the infamous Carlsbad caverns, the Russian orthodox monks of St. Anthony outpost, NASA facilities and military laboratories are all part of WAX’s surreal world. I’ve noticed that recently you’ve been creating sculptural objects derived from the films and installations that further the cinematic world you’ve created. Is this a new practice for you? What comes first, the object or the narrative?
David Blair: I realized after Wax how much of the story and its meaning were spatial [the grotesque , which I thought a good bit about in the years before, is a genre that often depends on spatial tropes]. And so yes, I did think, a couple years ago, to work with literal space, and that was one of the reasons to start that.
The objects, and kamishibai-style paintings, were at first an attempt to take the Lost Tribes movie out of the computer, where it was difficult to grasp, being made of terabytes and all. So that was an additional useful reason [using space and objects to remember and recompose]. The objects and paintings are lined up in two series, about a hundred of each. I did a couple expos with them, one near Paris, and another during the 2011 Rotterdam Film Festival [also did a live mix concert there, part of another um series of hours of live telepathy]. Right now, I’ve got these in line ready to be written about in the blog mentioned above, and I’ve decided to use them as objects for video. Some of them are already up, if you scroll through the filmstrip blog.
Generally speaking, the object/story relation is pretty much like the historical fact/story or voice/picture/music relation… each comes first, and all come after the others.
It has been about 20 years since WAX OR THE DISCOVERY OF TELEVISION AMONG THE BEES — the first film on the Internet. Since then, the Internet has become a common venue for cinema, especially independent cinema. Where does WAX’s follow-up lie in terms of release and distribution today?
David Blair: Well, first off, I think the same sales rules apply. One thing, as an independent, you can’t quite know in which direction your release is going to go, and where your best success will be. I really mean the first in a basic sense…. I thought Wax was going to sold to television, not shown in movie theaters, and as for internet, well…. A second rule is that, as a marginal player, your audience is really almost built one person at a time, until you finally get the chance to get up to one venue at a time.
Last time I made the movie [Wax], and then the online version [Waxweb, http://waxweb.org ]. The latter was a sort of experiment for the second project…. and now I’ve decided to follow the logic and experience of that previous work, and actually do it online first… there’s a better explanation of that here: http://www.telepathic-movie.org/place/en/2012/04/08/about-this-site So in some way, the current ambition is “make” the movie online, or at least record the Making Of, and turn that into a regular movie, like Wax. So, that’s to say that distribution and composition are a bit mixed up, but that was something I anticipated would happen.
I’ll have to run a Kickstarter or equivalent campaign in the next year, to get the music done, and get through the film,and so audience building is of course part of the Making Of site. . Other than that, I’m still figuring it out, as I have been for years. My shoes are on fire, so I’m running to put it out.
The Telepathic Motion Picture of THE LOST TRIBES
My first long project, called "Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees" [1991], had a long, complicated incubation period. The project began as an experimental short around 1981, became a feature narrative project around 1985, and was finally released on film and video in 1991. While the film was in theatres, I began an internet version of the project, which began in April 1993, when Wax became first feature sent across the internet, links here:
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/24/business/cult-film-is-a-first-on-internet.html
http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/wax/waxweb/image/tid/5
http://www.indiewire.com/article/critics_notebook_why_the_internet_sustains_smaller_tales_from_the_polish_br
That project, called Waxweb, can be found at http://waxweb.org .
I worked steadily on this project until about 2000. It was meant both as a sort of "transmedia" [as they say now] version of the film, and as a laboratory for my second project, "The Telepathic Motion Picture of THE LOST TRIBES", which I began at the same time as Waxweb.
That is to say, I've been at work on this second feature/project for 19 years now. A lot of the technique that I struggled with in the early years of the project... HD video, realtime graphics, very long video narrative, internet distribution... are natural and easy now. In general, it is a lot easier to make a video now, so, just make.
With that in mind, I've decided to follow the logic of this project, and release in reverse... that is to say, with the "making of" first. As I started to say, I spent a lot of time on Waxweb, with the intention of using it as the prototype for a "video/writing" machine that would allow me to make the long story of "...The Lost Tribes". A lot of what I was searching for are implicit in the way we make movies now. Others are not... for instance, writing to or writing with video, in an edit, is still really difficult. I don't mean writing a script meant to be broken down for production... I mean writing and revising while making and looking at pictures in flux.
So, at a formal level, that is what I am going to work through here, in a simple fashion. I'm going to write through this video project. If this was a series, or a massively multiplayer online game, or whatever, you would call the organized backstory, narrative sections, and research material I have collected while making over the last 19 years by the name of Project Bible. I'm going to start lurching through this Bible, creating short films that tell the story, or the ideas of the story, or the physical making of it . There will be discontinuities in this presentation which won't be there later on, but I'll provide descriptions and clues which will provide some orientation. Expect a lot of different things. The story is made in many media. It is mainly video, but there are also electrical devices, movietalker paintings, reconstructions of telepathic places, reconstructions of live telepathic performance, recomposition of telepathic music, etc etc. The modern usual. There will be many times in the same place, if that phrase works here.
If you've seen the movie "Wax...", or if you've spent time with "Waxweb", you'll probably be pleased to know that, as a part my following the logic of the project, I've decided to make "...THE LOST TRIBES" a sort of sequel to both. That is to say, Waxweb will blend into Lost Tribes, as will Wax. I'm curious to see how that works. Expect it to be a bit odd at the start.
So, in a nutshell, whatever that means, I'm inviting you to watch and participate in the making of "The Telepathic Motion Picture of THE LOST TRIBES". And for that, I thank you.
"Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees" [1984-present]
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Cult Film Is a First On Internet
As
historic moments go, this one, it could be argued, was closer to
"Watson, come here!" than to another Saturday night at the movies.
A small audience scattered among a few dozen computer laboratories gathered Saturday evening to watch the first movie to be transmitted on the Internet -- the global computer network that connects millions of scientists and academic researchers and hitherto has been a medium for swapping research notes and an occasional still image.
Yes, the cult movie, "Wax: Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees," had to be reduced from full color to a blurry black and white. And true, the spotty audio occasionally went silent. But coming as companies in the cable TV, telephone and computer industries are hot on the trail of 500-channel, all-digital TV, let history record that Saturday night marked the first baby steps in that direction.
The movie, an 85-minute feature by David Blair about a beekeeper who ends up being kept by the bees, has attracted a cult following since its release in 1992. Mr. Blair transmitted it Saturday night from a film production studio in midtown Manhattan. He played it on a VCR and fed it into a computer that converted it into digital form and fed it into the Internet. Promises, Promises
A small audience scattered among a few dozen computer laboratories gathered Saturday evening to watch the first movie to be transmitted on the Internet -- the global computer network that connects millions of scientists and academic researchers and hitherto has been a medium for swapping research notes and an occasional still image.
Yes, the cult movie, "Wax: Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees," had to be reduced from full color to a blurry black and white. And true, the spotty audio occasionally went silent. But coming as companies in the cable TV, telephone and computer industries are hot on the trail of 500-channel, all-digital TV, let history record that Saturday night marked the first baby steps in that direction.
The movie, an 85-minute feature by David Blair about a beekeeper who ends up being kept by the bees, has attracted a cult following since its release in 1992. Mr. Blair transmitted it Saturday night from a film production studio in midtown Manhattan. He played it on a VCR and fed it into a computer that converted it into digital form and fed it into the Internet. Promises, Promises
Mr.
Blair's effort demonstrated that while information industry giants like
Tele-Communications Inc., A.T.& T. and Time Warner are tantalizing
the nation with promises of hundreds of channels of
ultra-high-resolution interactive pictures transmitted via fiber-optic
superhighways, the technology is still in its infancy.
Indeed, it was not until halfway through the digital network premier of "Wax" that the engineers gathered at an office of Sun Microsystems Inc. in Mountain View, Calif., were even able to find the movie signal in the Internet datastream and direct it to play on their color work stations.
And when it finally flickered into view on an eight-inch window within a computer screen, it was clear that digital broadcasting was not yet ready for prime time. In part because of limited data-carrying capacity of the Internet, the movie had only about half the resolution of a normal television image. Surrealer Than Surreal
Even more disorienting, the movie was broadcast at the dream-like rate of two frames a second, instead of the broadcast standard of 24, giving it an even more surreal quality than the big-screen original.
The soundtrack came through haltingly, frequently broken up by what the engineers called "packet drop out" when the Internet became too congested with other data traffic.
Despite the flaws, the engineers at Sun Microsystems said they considered the premier a success.
"We really don't understand the problem of sending thousands of simultaneous digital video signals yet," said Tom Kessler, a Sun software engineer. "Come back in six months and this stuff will be working flawlessly."
Indeed, digital video broadcasting over the Internet is now being developed independently by small groups of researchers at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, the Information Sciences Institute in Los Angeles and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California, and at the corporate laboratories of Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Mass.
It's 9:45 PM, and I'm walking through New Orleans Square at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. The water show is in full swing, with miraculous sudden set changes. . . . The giant pirate boat with fifty actors has turned and is completely hidden behind a corner too small for it, and multiple thirty-foot evil magic-mirror faces hang on mist screens above the water. I decide to take a sudden turn myself, to visit the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. A few feet down the path, the crowd is gone, and the water show almost inaudible. The ride is on a narrow waterway with flat-bottom boats inexorably driven forward through the artificial landscape by a fearsome chain-and-gear mechanism hidden under the water. I'm in my seat, and twenty seconds later we are underground, on a river in a cave system somewhere beneath Disneyland, somewhere in the Caribbean, probably near the storage space of that missing water-show pirate ship. And, simultaneously, I am almost back in the Carlsbad Caverns National Monument, true wonder of the underworld, alone, after midnight, during the production of my film WAX or the discovery of television among the bees. Floating on a boat attached by bottom chains to an artificial underground Disney-Caribbean river is not that much different from walking alone, at midnight, through the unbelievable underground and path-determined space of Carlsbad Caverns, moving in half-light among giant rock forms. That afternoon, deeper in the cave, I'd had a beekeeper's suit on and been standing around the corner of the one-way path from a cameraman, almost leaning on a fractionally detailed limestone formation. On the cameraman's cue, I was supposed to create a material wipe suddenly by walking around the corner, but we had to keep delaying the shot as tourists kept appearing behind me on the one-way path . . . surprising me, but not themselves. I was just part of the landscape, and several even said, "The moon, huh?" before turning the next corner and finding the camera. I was part of their ride, but they knew I was also thousands of feet underneath the moon, maybe somewhere in France on the set of a Melies movie, or perhaps back at Disneyland, back at Pirates of the Caribbean.
An interesting and vital part of navigation in immersive environments is the effect of sudden mode change . . . often, turning a corner, you are instantly in another environment, as if you had just passed through the spatial equivalent of a soft-edged wipe. What is shocking is that these mode changes can often take you to an environment that contradicts the one you just came from, both in appearance, and in meaning and use . . . like turning a smooth corner at the base of the Matterhorn at Disneyland, and ending up at the end of a row of urinals.
The first effect of this spatial mode change, I believe, is that one becomes more susceptible to association. In other words, free navigation in an immersive environment leads to mode changes, and mode changes lead to an increase in association, sometimes internal, and sometimes external. The latter we call coincidence.
Back in the early 1970s, I learned a lot from surreal audio theater pieces put out by the group Firesign Theatre. I hadn't listened to them for almost twenty years until I bought them as used records, in preparation for a trip to a computer graphics convention called SIGGRAPH '93. Off the plane under the memorial statue at the John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, in an enormous surrounding glass abutment that was the center of a high imperial postmodern building (so obviously built first in the computer that regular holes had been designed in the mold of the parking garage's poured roof to allow what started as elephant feet underground to turn into a grid of optimistic palm trees above), I realized I'd better go to Disneyland before I got too busy. Four hours later, it was closing time at Disneyland, and I was emerging from the bathroom across from the Matterhorn. I'd just bought my first Walkman the month before, and wasn't used to the dual alienation and audio overlay effect you get from a Walkman, so I put the headphones on again with self-conscious semireluctance, and went back to "We're All Bozo's on This Bus" (Firesign Theatre, 1971), written at the beginning of the age of video as an imagination of what government-inflicted simulation might really be like. Putting the story briefly, a bus comes to town, and Clem gets on board. It turns out that the bus is actually a seamless virtual reality environment, that may or may not take Clem to a future amusement park very similar to what I imagine is Ross Perot's vision of the Information Superhighway.
While meeting the audioanimatronic president on the White House Ride, Clem reveals himself as a quasi-revolutionary hacker, who conversationally forces the robot president into maintenance mode, in order to talk to Dr. Memory, the real program running the simulation. Clem is inside the machine, and inside the program, calling out to Dr. Memory: "Read me, Dr. Memory! Read me Dr. Memory!"There's a full moon out, the Matterhorn is white, and the gondola cables are dark and visible against the sky. Suddenly, there's an additional voice and space on the tape, which it takes about ten seconds to identify as coming from the entire southern slope of the Matterhorn, which has begun to speak in the sublime voice of a woman on a microphone saying: "Shutting Down System A. Shutting Down System A. Check. Shutting Down System B. Check." A male voice replies conversationally to the technical woman from another set of speakers across the way. In the meantime, Clem, who had already succeeded in breaking the president, has just shut down the entire Future Fair.
The effect of modal change and association, - whether the latter takes place in the imagination, or in the world as coincidence, is that you end up with a sort of spatial fiction, what Jay Bolter in his book on electronic writing called a topical, or topographic fiction, a fiction of aphorisms and situations, spread in front of you as a field of places that can change from one to the other in a variety of ways. Traveling through the fiction is like navigating through an immersive environment, and vice versa.
2. HAPTIC DIMENSIONS
Navigation through immersive environments is of course a serious problem in the world, an enjoyable problem in amusement parks, and a highly rhetoricized one in virtual worlds. Already, in an amusement park, we are often on the verge of fiction making. By the time we get to virtual reality, we find ourselves in the midst of a full-blown metafiction.
Metafictions have been described as fictions that examine the creation of systems, especially themselves and other fictions, with particular attention to the ways in which these systems transform and filter reality. There is an assumption in this sort of fiction making that we are locked in a world we have created, a fictional world shaped by narrative and subjective forms developed to generate meaning and stabilize our perceptions. Metafictions don't operate on aesthetic assumptions of verisimilitude, but exult in their own ficticiousness. They assume that there are no true descriptions in fiction, only constructions, which may not have any relation to the world.
Navigation in virtual worlds tends to disrupt the ordinary balance that exists between our exterior senses and our interpretive subjectivity. It is no accident that virtual reality has been compared with hallucinogens. LSD, alcohol, fatigue, and lucid dreaming have all provided us with many examples of this disruption, all tending to reveal what I would call the haptic dimensions of thought: a sudden intuition of the material nature of thought, of how thought is received from the environment, and at the same time transforms the environment. Acid trips, for example, are famous for their mode changes, sudden and powerful associations, and constant commentary on themselves, a unified metafictional experience that often leaves the user with the powerful impression that thought is literally another and different physical sense.
Of course, the same effect is common to exhaustion in immersive environments. After the Matterhorn spoke through speakers, I made the very long walk back to my hotel across the famous vast parking lot, past the gate and down a long street with a new sidewalk that switched from one side of the street to the other every block. Four hours off the plane, with miniature golf to one side, the Charismatic Convention Center to the other, and naked power pylons above, I was waiting for the next epiphany, as I could barely tell the difference between Disneyland and California. I received my epiphany in the appearance of a small rectangular concrete cover embedded in, and the same color as, the sidewalk. On the molded top there was engraved the word "telephone," which in the tunnel of my exhaustion made me think too clearly about the power lines invisible under the overlit night street, about my telephone at home, barely lit and unseen by my wife, who was certainly asleep in another room; about the last phone I used to call her, a pay phone back at Disneyland — in general, about both the limits of my knowledge, and the connectedness of words, my thoughts, and the world, and how, in making those connections, my thoughts had acted like a strange sense, seeing things so far away, or impossible to see.
I believe this is related to something the mathematician Poincare said when describing his theory of conventionalism, the main purpose of which was to assert that the space described by the convention of Euclid's theorems did not rule out other spaces with their own self-consistent sets of rules. In certain descriptions of space, he said, there could also be haptic dimensions where every muscle was a dimension.
This thought fascinated people at the turn of the century, and was related by them to the notion that the fourth dimension was an alternate spatial dimension, at right angles to everything we know. In many ways, these enthusiasms were parts of an attempt to deal with subjectivity as a dimension and as a sense — an n-dimensional sense, since with so many possible descriptions, there was no point in stopping the count. Nowadays, with human-computer interface technology, we have come to a literalization of the idea of haptic dimensions. Now, the world can be mapped to muscles, so that a small hand gesture inside a dataglove can be used to navigate, or even to increase the amount of space available in a virtual world.
Speaking about the human-computer interface in his book Virtual Reality, Howard Rheingold says,
“We build models of the world inside our head, using the data from sense organs and the information processing capacity of our brain. We habitually think of the world we see as out there, but what we are really seeing is a mental model, a perceptual simulation that only exists in the brain.That simulation capability is where human minds and digital computers share a potential for synergy.â€
I find it fascinating that Rheingold is not just a great popularizer of virtual reality. He is also a popularizer of lucid dreaming technologies, which allow a dreamer literally paralyzed by sleep to communicate information from a parallel, artificial, and autonomous world out to sleep researchers, using a Morse code of eye wiggles. I take it as a clue that our equivalent of the turn-of-the-century fascination with haptic and higher dimensions can nowadays be found in the theme of potentially autonomous alternate worlds which exist in machines as virtual reality and artificial life, or in our world, as Jurassic Park, and which share among themselves the qualities of metafiction.
3. META JP
In North America, we were already immersed and navigating within Jurassic Park. Of course, Jurassic Park, the film, is only a single interstice within an immersive, navigable environment made up of the various media that Jurassic Park, the concept, is presented in, ranging from wearable shirts and wrappings for burgers at McDonalds to many of the booths at SIGGRAPH, and beyond that to future theme-park rides. Metafictional elements are the audiences' navigation within this environment . . . from product to product, from place to place . . . best emblematized by the film audience's common smile at the only really visible product placement in the entire film: the Jurassic Park memorabilia that can be seen on screen in the Jurassic Park gift shop. Given the fact that the film is part of an immersive environment, this moment is more than an advertisement for itself. It is like the Pirates of the Caribbean (though designed for a more limited and practical effect), a metafiction emblem of navigation, modal change, and potential association used to sell you shirts, or whatever you might want when you decide you want it.
Navigation is an important theme within the film. Richard Attenborough, famous film director in our world, stars as the concept- and money-man behind Jurassic Park, a world within our world where dinosaurs live again. He transports our mam characters to the island in the bellies of helicopters, to see and approve the mystery of his creation. First stop, after a brief witnessing of this creation, is the island's museum movie theater. There everyone is treated to a film within the film, in which Attenborough clones himself to introduce us to the idea of reproduction without sex. Suddenly the movie theater becomes a theme-park ride. Restraining bars come down over the seatbound, a wall opens, and, diorama-style, a living laboratory behind a plate-glass wall begins to scroll past the riders; dinosaur-reproduction workers are visible inside the laboratory. The lawyer character whispers to Richard Attenborough: how marvelous, it's all so realistic . . . are those automatons? Attenborough replies: no, we have no animatronics here. They're real! It is at this moment that the three scientist characters, so taken by this completely immersive environment — there is no question of real or unreal for them! — decide that they have to navigate. Communally, they force up the restraining bars, and exit the ride, cybernetic sailors on this narrative's oceanic pond!
If you've ever seen Mel Brooks's film Blazing Saddles, you'll remember the famous climatic horse chase, whose climax is a sudden modal change, where the chase crashes through a painted landscape backdrop, and finds itself backstage. With no loss of momentum, the riders continue on to the next set, where they disrupt a Busby Berkeley—style movie in mid production. That's how I tend to view the scientist's jump off the ride, as well as the famous scene when the autonomous and artificial Tyrannosaurus rex crashes through the Park's unelectric fence at the beginning of the film's recorded disaster.
Of course, by that point in Jurassic Park, the associative process is already in overdrive. For instance, what are the dinosaurs? Before seeing them, most people already know that they are this age's miracle of computer-generated pseudo-autonomous entertainment reality. In the film, we also learn they are earthburied bone that can be made visible aboveground in the middle of the Badlands of South Dakota through the use of shock waves generated by elephant-gun shells, which create echoes that can be written to computer screens as image-processed pictures. They are DNA held invisible within mosquitoes doubly hidden within miraculous transparent amber buried deep in the earth, which yet can be dug up, extracted, and revealed as equivalent to the wall-to-wall scrolling alphabetic texture that covers the cinema screen in the movie within the movie at the Jurassic Park Museum — DNA letters actually generated during the dinosaur's fateful afterdeath mating with frogs that can change their own sex. I can't even begin to go into the number of descriptive associations this film can generate. To my mind, it is a great associative narrative ¦ a truly atemporal, or should I say spatialized, film.
4. SGI
Which brings us to Jurassic Park, the potential virtual reality. Several weeks after seeing the movie, two days after Disneyland, I found myself at Discovery Park, part of the Silicon Graphics booth at SIGGRAPH '93. It was here that I had a chance to reconsider what I had thought to be one of the most sublime or subliminal elements of the film: the overarching, fractionally dimensional, and ultimately recursive theme best expressed by the main scientist in the phrase "you'll never look at birds the same way again."
If I remember correctly ... at the beginning of the film, we're in the Badlands with the main scientists, digging fossils. The shotgun shell has gone off, revealing the subterranean velociraptor skeleton on their outdoor, but not particularly mobile, computer screen. In the midst of a violently imaginative fleshing out of the dinosaur's previous body and behavior, the scientist says, "You'll never look at birds the same way again." This phrase, stranger than it seems, and said with awareness of its effect, echoes through the film in hundreds of ways, becoming, as if by default, a main theme. Moments after the fatal pronouncement, Richard Attenborough arrives by helicopter to take the scientists to Jurassic Park, where it is their job to judge whether this high-entertainment concept can fit in our world. The park implodes, the dinosaurs riot, and the scientists barely escape . . . but they do, in the belly of a helicopter. At the film's wordless end, the main scientist looks through the clear window, or dead eye, of his artificial bird, and finds what appears to be the sublime in the image of a pelican winding its wings over the ocean beneath him, which, except for an exterior shot of the helicopter in flight, is pretty much the last shot in the film. Despite all the emotion on his face and in the soundtrack, I have to say that I really don't know what it is the scientist sees, but it certainly is a bird.
At SIGGRAPH, the day before I actually did find my way to SGI's Discovery Park, I was standing two halls away in line at the Virtual Reality Laboratory, part of a virtual reality museum ride created for an exhibit called Imaging, the Tools of Science to be installed at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. The visual interface was the Fakespace Boom 2C, a boom-suspended periscope-style cube with a high-resolution stereoscopic display inside . . . more vividly, something like a large, swivelable, realtime ViewMaster at the end of a very fancy articulating lamp stand. Virtual Reality Lab was essentially a fly ride through several surreal and constructed worlds.
First you find yourself in a bare, circular room, with your previously grabbed portrait on the wall, and a polygonally crude Fakespace Boom 2C recursively in front of you. Back in the real world, with the real boom, you can swivel around and look at the room, all the while inexorably advancing toward your portrait, which, at a certain distance, shivers into fragments that flock together and fly through the hole left by their disassembly. You have to follow them, through the hole, to find yourself floating in the clouds. The birds that were ,you, depart ahead and above. To the side is a girder-thick red wire-frame cow, a sort of surrogate cloud, and directly ahead is a structure that once again you are inexorably heading toward and then through, a sort of open-ended floating skyhouse made of four circuit boards in extreme perspective, and a fifth right ahead. The moment before colliding with the fatal frontal board, you can see the image of a flower, and by the miracle of modal change, you find that you have passed through to emerge out of a patch of flowers in the center of a park, a main natural space in a Potemkin village made of textured flats.
All this, seen from the particular angle chosen by the Fakespace user, is also projected on a video screen behind the person standing with head up to the swiveling box. I didn't actually get to put my head up to the box that day, as the line was quite long. Time is always a consideration at SIGGRAPH, and since I didn't have a watch, I turned around to ask the fellow behind me what time it was. Before he started to speak I could see he didn't have a watch, and so I stopped in midsentence, just as he started to say something that I couldn't hear. Out of politeness, I said, "What?" and he said, "Right now," so I said "What?" and he said, "You asked me what time it was, and I said it's right now." I agreed.
Twenty six hours later, just before finally getting to Silicon Graphics' Discovery World, I found myself waiting in line to pay for my lunch at the International Food Court. Again I needed to know what time it was, so I turned around and asked the person behind me. I recognized it was the same fellow just before he inevitably said, "I said, it's right now. Don't you remember?" surprising both of us, as it had been estimated there were 10,000 other people with us in the Anaheim convention center. So, to be polite, as we obviously had something in common, I read his shirt, which said "The Virtual Museum," and asked, "What's the Virtual Museum?" He didn't really want to answer, and I didn't really find out until the next day, when I came across the actual Virtual Museum, back in "Machine Culture," as the art show was known during this SIGGRAPH year. The Virtual Museum being sort of a common interface for inexpensive, individually created virtual worlds, a sort of museum atrium through which one could enter, under arches, any compatible virtual world module you might pick up from the Internet, or a floppy disk. The Virtual Museum describes itself as therefore allowing anyone to explore ancient Egypt, pre-Columbian Peru, and Atlantis. None of this information being offered by my space-time companion at the International Food Court, I decided to push the situation, so I read his convention badge, which always has one's name and job function printed on it at SIGGRAPH . . . apparently he worked for a company called Earth. So I asked, "What's Earth?" and he said, "That's where I live."
After that and lunch, I was off to Discovery Park, where the line was too long, so I talked my way in the back door. "Discovery Park is an Interactive Entertainment and Virtual Reality Experience!" was written on the brochure, and inside, there were birds.
First was a pterodactyl-shaped, user-mountable ride, where a canyon environment appeared on three large high-definition screens in front of the viewer, who steered the flying machine from its virtual back, with wing tips and pterodactyl-head occasionally visible. Everyone in the room could see the screens, and there was a bit of ambiguity whether or not the rider was actually the bird having an out-of-body experience, with the annoyed bird-body continuously attempting to catch the eye of the floating oversoul. Networked to this was the private, two-million-pixel Fakespace Boom 3C, which apparently allowed you to look around while the pterodactyl-person did the steering through the inevitably progressing air. No one else could see what the person at the Fakespace boom saw. Third node on the network was yet another viewpoint, embodied in a high-resolution and also resolutely private head-mounted display from Kaiser Electro-Optics.
People were also looking at birds differently in the Evans and Sutherland booth, which had SIGGRAPH's other user-mountable flying demo ride, a sort of Sports Simulation Gym where your body was a hang-glider spaceship in an extraordinarily complex and enclosed high-definition city space. In the Reagan-Bush years, we would have immediately thought of the military as the buyer or maker of such flying rides, as well as flying things, and uncontrollable carnivores. But now is the time when we instead remember that Link, inventor of the flight simulator, came to that device from his work designing rides for amusement parks.
Link's flight simulator took the roller coaster off the ground using pneumatic motion, making the rider into a bird in a box. Before computer graphics could match the realism of that motion, miniature landscapes were built, reconstructions of appropriate countrysides, which the flight-simulator pilot could see through a motion-controlled camera that floated on a grid above the model board. In this time before computer graphics, many people identified visual simulation with such physical miniatures, so that there it was no great associative leap from the model board to Disneyland. Of course, at that time, one of the logical associative paths leading out of Disneyland was the idea of government-inflicted simulation, presented "In Technical Stimulation," as the Firesign Theatre put it. And certainly, visiting Anaheim's ancient Disneyland, it is very easy to arrive at an idea of the intimate linkage of entertainment and death, especially in New Orleans Square, where Pirates of the Caribbean begins, after establishing the cave, with skeletal pirates guarding gold, and then proceeds through torture and rape to end with an ecstatically drunken pistol duel held in a gunpowder storage cellar.
In Jurassic Park, the single skeptical scientist, overhearing Richard Attenborourgh say that a mechanized tour of Jurassic Park is as safe as any amusement park ride, then volunteers: "But on the Pirates of the Caribbean, if the pirates get loose, they don't eat the tourists." So what should we see when we look at birds flying free as a tyrannosaurus rex through the air?
In WAX or the discovery of television among the bees, Jacob Maker works on a simple, local network of flight simulators, a 1983 precursor to what in 1986 or so became SIMNET, a wide-area simulation networking scheme that allowed a group of pilots sitting in flight simulators somewhere in Tennessee to train with people driving tank simulators in California, all together in the same limited, synthetic environment. This sort of networked simulation prepared the way for the raid on Libya, the invasion of Panama, and ultimately for the Gulf War. The proposed successor to SIMNET is called DSI, or the Distributed Simulation Internet, if I have the correct acronym, which combines broader bandwidth with new graphics and networking standards, literally allowing an army of linked individuals, spread across the globe, to join each other in that military amusement park. Not formally different from what some people propose for interactive, navigable, immersive cable-TV games. Of course, what does program content mean in the context of this DSI?
Or what is history? One of the first implementations of the DSI was a minute-by-minute, foot-by-foot reconstruction of a Gulf War skirmish known as the Battle of 73 Easting. As you might expect, it plays the battle forward and backward, and allows you to view it from any angle. It also allows you to create alternate battles from this reality base. Considering how much history has already been prepared in cyberspace, it is truly metafictional that 73 Easting was presented to the Senate as the first example of virtual history.
Unfortunately, this is a normal theme in the history of the history of technology. Television is an excellent example. According to Steven Spielberg's ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, it was possibly the God of Israel who invented both television and virtual reality. But according to the Nazis and some others, it was Paul Nipkow who discovered television and virtual reality in Berlin in the 1880s. His fascinating electromechanical telephone for the eyes coupled unique spinning-disk spiral scanners, known as image dissectors, with magnetically controlled crystals that occultly served as light valves.
Nipkow worked for the city railroad company during the electrification and "transportification" (a deliberate rhyme with fortification) of Berlin, designing a streetcar semaphore signal system. It is a not so odd fact that his television system mainly resembled the axles and wheels of a railroad car . . . two spinning-disk scanners synchronized by a fixed axle between.
By the 1890s, the signal system was apparently in place, the job had probably settled down, and in his private inventing life, Nipkow had moved on, bypassing further development on the television to focus on his new obsession, the invention of a working helicopter.
More than thirty years later in Weimer Berlin, construction began on the Funkturm, the Eiffel Tower of radio, defining what became the communications heart of Berlin, an area so important that it later was given the name of Adolf Hitler Platz. Nipkow was an old man, and practical, low-resolution, mechanical television systems based on his scanning scheme had come into existence in Germany, Britain, the United States, and elsewhere. This was television with less than forty lines, but it was a commercial television, with regular scheduled broadcasts from the Funkturm by 1929. At that moment, it became clear that the real challenge for television engineers lay in high-resolution television. Breakthroughs in high-frequency research promised broadcast systems and receiver sets with over 400 image lines.
Certain people knew that this same technology would also make possible a practical system of radio-wave-based detection and ranging of distant flying objects — what we know as radar. As a result, as mechanical television died a natural death, due in part to the worsening financial situation worldwide, a decision was made in the three main television-producing countries to promote the creation of a popular, entertainment-oriented high-definition television system; the goal, never publicly stated, was to create both the industrial and human resource base necessary to design and manufacture a practical air-defense system.
This created a peculiar situation. Germany provides the best example. First, Hitler declared all German television research a state secret. Then the public search began for facts that would establish German priority in television research — historical priority. Paul Nipkow was snatched from obscurity to become a new national hero, the Father of Television. England replied, or maybe they started it all, with the Edisonification of John Logie Baird, who became the Other Father of Television.
In every country, television history, like television itself, was discovered, or invented. Books were written, and in other places, factories were built. In 1941, not long after the radar machines were switched on in England, Holland, Germany, and elsewhere, Paul Nipkow died, which triggered his greatest honor. Paul Nipkow's funeral was broadcast live on Fernsehsender Paul Nipkow, the Nazi high-definition television station named after him and broadcasting from atop the Funkturm in Berlin.
5. PARALLEL WORLDS
More than fifty years after Nipkow, or right now, as my more associationally minded colleague from Earth might say, we have mind amplifiers, as Howard Rheingold calls the modern computer. Artificial realities have increased in number, mechanical and immaterial transportation have improved, and with the necessary increase in modal changes have come increases in the descriptive power of association and metafiction. So, again, what should we see when we look at birds? Maybe, metafictionally, they could remind us of a navigational ethics: since the ride is so many different possible things, and since on occasion we are on the other side of the ride, go ahead and go where you are going, in whatever way you wish to travel, just try to remember you are responsible if you kill when you get there. Unfortunately our usual sad situation is very much like that of the religious soul told to remember something after death, who, on arrival in the other world, only remembered once having had a conversation with someone, but not what was said.
Several months ago, at the Cyberspace Conference in Austin, a fellow came up to me and said, ‘Congratulations, I work at Hughes Aircraft, and I used to have the same job as that guy in your film.’ In WAX, a narrative metafiction, Jacob Maker works on the Integrated Air Battle Mission Simulator, writing the code that controls the acquisition of target information. It is up to him to make sure that the gunsight displays work; that what the pilot sees, whether by radar, infrared, or simple sight, does coordinate with his use of weapons. By "congratulations," the fellow from Hughes meant that he used to be Jacob. After twelve to sixteen hours in a completely immersive, photorealistic flying environment, it was time to go outdoors, and as he told me: "I'd go outdoors, just out onto the street, and I'd wonder . . . am I supposed to kill now? And what was really strange, you know, was that after a while, I started seeing these lines. They were just floating in the air, like the marks your guy was seeing in the film." The fellow from Hughes was much happier now, as he had gotten himself transferred out to a part of the company that was trying to find a way to convert flight simulators mto personal amusement-park pods.
Unfortunately, in either entertainment or -war, navigation isn't usually free. It's closer to semi-autonomous. Often, in both, you can go where you want, but only as long as you make sure you kill and spend disposable income. Grotesque narrative dealt with this particular difficulty of navigational ethics in immersive environments long ago, by transferring autonomy to the artificial world ... by stripping the creator of an artificial world of all free will, and passing a parody of that on to his or her creations. Such fictions are invariably metafictions, as there is always a rather smooth continuum from the created and autonomous world to the narrative itself, which, being also a creation, is implicitly also autonomous. This is halfway to recursion, the creation of endless mirrors, or other interfoldings ot space and light, which in metafiction have always led to worlds within worlds, just around the corner from us but burdened with other space-time rules, not just alternate histories, but parallel universes.
When the Jurassic scientist, embedded in the belly of the anonymously piloted helicopter, looks out through the metal bird's window-eye at the free-floating pelican, it is easy for me to make the associative jump to the artificial-life scientists, who watch freely navigating autonomous graphic agents on computer machines, and see life. They claim that automatism, of the kind once given rhetorically in grotesque fictions to describe an ethical dilemma, has now become practical. With this, metafiction becomes perhaps experimentally verifiable. Windows open onto other worlds that might really be there.
The Game of Life is a computer program — a virtual, time-based machine that floats as distributed, changing patterns inside many popular mind amplifiers. This program consists of a small set of rules, a tiny grammar that controls an on/off graphic display of dots clustered together as gridded pixels on the two-dimensional screen you see from outside the machine. The rules turn the pixel dots on and off, and make the dots interact with each other in order to determine the order of this flashing. Some of the patterns resulting from this interaction have the ability to grow and maintain themselves in complicated shapes, which can move through two-dimensional screen space, and even reproduce. Writers and players of the game claim that these dot-group pattern behaviors are mimetic of life itself. They then, on occasion, argue that anything that so clearly imitates life must be alive itself, potentially with a point of view, as part of a limited but autonomous alternate world embedded within our own.
The Game of Life is an example of cellular automata in action. Cellular automata have also been practically applied to image processing. The pictures to be processed in this manner have often been machine gathered and transmitted to us through great noise from places not part of our normal point of view; for instance, the point of view of someone who can read the constituent parts of your blood; or the point of view of a television camera on the top of a rocket plummeting out of control toward the moon. Pictures to be processed are divided into pixels; the grammars go to work on these pixels, forcing them to interact, forcing the picture to become more visible to us. Potentially living, or at least potentially autonomous, pixel groups self-organize into potentially autonomous, substantial, though still changeable image shapes, leaving us with pictures that have more visible information than before the process started.
As cinema collapses into the computer, where it will meet virtual reality, science, and many other residents of our cultural world, we approach a situation where all the film-production data, gathered from places beyond our ordinary point of view, are passed into a unitary workstation. The maker, sitting in front of the workstation screen, works on this data like cellular automata on pixels, forcing various pieces of meaning to interact so that pictures will become more visible to us. However, simultaneously, the maker will also encounter real automata inside the machine.
The maker slowly navigates through the real-time, proto-narrative space of the production data, applying any of a variety of processes to that data, in any sequence desired, controlling composition within frames and between frames interactively, occasionally mixing real-world images with synthetic objects or character elements — all the time composing literal and associative meaning. All processes, from the manipulation of synthetic geometries to the collation of associations, have been partially mechanized, so that the narrative building proceeds with a partial autonomy that allows the workstation screen to look back. The mind amplifier has become a mirror, and at a rhetorical and virtual distance behind the mirror, anti-eyes connected to an anti-body in an alternate universe embedded in ours watch back with a glimmer of narrative intelligence, ready to play you back all the histories of that 73 Easting patch of desert, including the many possible alternate flight paths of semi-autonomous weapons over that part of virtual Iraq…. misguided missiles that are willing to stop and assist you with both spell checking and story building, if that's what the story requires.
In many Japanese newspaper offices, there are old and giant composition typewriters with hundreds of keys for the thousands of pictographic kanji characters. Each key has twenty-one shifts — the Roman alphabet almost hides in a single key. Writers, however, now use personal word processors with the same number of typewriter keys we are used to, that hold both the miniature, alternate Japanese phonetic alphabet, along with the Roman. As you type, the computer collates your pseudo-phonetic strokes, compares them with a built-in kanji chart, and offers you choices of alternate picturewords in a menu at the bottom of the page — a spell checker in reverse, an inadvertent poetry machine mechanizing the processes of association. In cinema, as it slowly collapses into personal computers, kanji are replaced by images and sound, and the semi-phonetic alphabet by your descriptions of your images, the computer offering fill-in-the-blanks association opportunities (or, in less delicate software, spell-checking necessities), to help you get that story into reasonably communicative shape.
Give names to pictures in a semi-intelligent picture processor, and the machine begins to sort the pictures into protosequences.The maker looks at these, chooses the clumpings that are pleasing, perhaps adjusts them a bit, then turns back to the machine, which reapplies its ultimately mutational rules of travel and association, adding organization in several possible ways, which are then again chosen from. Navigation through choices made by the machine soon becomes a primary form of story construction for the maker, who travels through machine-offered potential worlds, choosing the ones that become virtual worlds, leaving a trail of partial and rejected universes behind the maker, who has become a sort of aesthetic eugenicist.
The maker is still on a flat-bottomed boat in Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland, traveling inevitably forward, though in this case building rather than viewing. Whether traveling through alternate worlds, traveling through immersive environments that force the creation of association, or traveling through mechanized association in order to create immersive environments, navigational ethics remain a priority. In the future, when you can go anywhere you want, cinema, by whatever name, will become a grotesquerie without grotesques ... a metafiction where information wants to be free, and stories possessing senses, skills, and resources stutter in and out of existence in digital space-time, on earth and in other worlds. With immersive environments now even embedded within one another, with modal changes available at any moment, and association almost a style of knowledge, it's good to remember, though it may be difficult to remember, what it is you are supposed to remember.
Personally, I work in the area of cinema that I call image-processed narrative: a type of narrative where both the images and the narrative are processed by both myself and machines, and where, in the process, navigational ethics are attempted. So I welcome this, our new protofuture, where the past imitates the future, where metafiction is potentially experimentally verifiable; where, as in the book I read last week, wrinkles in the universal background cosmic microwave radiation led an enviably optimistic popular cosmologist to the conclusion that the universe is alive, that it reproduces, and that as a result there are infinite connected or embedded universes probably related, struggling through the impractical difficulties of evolution in action. A protofuture world where new and old media imitate one another, where the single user is not much different from the single author, and where rhetorical autonomy has been extended to machines — though hopefully, it will be given to people in equal or greater amounts.
[background: from 1995-97, I visited at R.A.C.E, the Research in Artifacts Center for Engineering, at Tokyo University... while there, I was asked to contribute to this magazine.]
Simulation and Art
It wasn't until the late 1980's that general-purpose computing finally came to the arts. Of course, many sorts of makers had been experimenting with the machine-qualities of computers since the late 50's, with many of the earlier experiments being centered on device control in the realm of machine-aided sculpture, as well as plotter control for 2-D output. What was generally more influential during this early period was the transmission of concept from the computing community to the arts community. The late '60's were an especially vigorous time for this exchange; for example, many artists were fascinated with the science of information, specifically the description of the relation between information and entropy. In the States, this was a contradictory period both of technological optimism (the Moon landing) and technological disillusionment (the Vietnam War, the growing environmental movement) . In such a climate, art/technology collaboration had important status, with events taking place both with institutional support, and as oppositional practice. It was in this period that changes in technology also allowed electronic (pre-digital) tools, such as video and varied sorts of analog signal processing, into the hands of individuals for the first time. Here again, idea often preceded actual functionality. An interesting example of this is the image-processing school of video-art, which took the concept of early digital image processing (such as pictures from beyond visibility made viewable through the machine) and applied them to their own analog-image manipulations. Paradoxically, after they had passed the analog video image through their hand-made image processing machines, it was often difficult to tell what the original picture had been, a result rather the opposite of what scientists intended with image processing. But the artist's declared intention was a metaphoric image processing, which would make other, normally invisible qualities of the image visible for the first time, through the mediation of the human-controlled machine.
In the mid-1980's, some artists began to work with personal computers. By this time, the concept of simulation had already come to the center of cross-discipline art thinking. It is difficult to unpack the many and often contradictory meanings that simulation took on in the art world, which was in the process of redefining itself as "post-modern". One of the most important thinkers to handle the concept, a French critic named Baudrillard, was well known for a type of writing in which metaphors bounced off one another until finally his presentation seemed to collapse into itself. However, this style was mimetic of his concept of what simulation meant for the modern world... an endless progression of copies, all of which functioned as replacements for the original, in a world where symbols were the only meaning, and yet where meaning was a concept that had irrevocably collapsed and disappeared. However, this idea is not as charged with horror and inaction as it might appear. To Baudrillard's eyes, society was ruled and defined by centralized media that attempted to simulate everything, from human relations to war news, and in which most "simulations" were faulty, actually created to carry lies; however an ironic appraisal and appropriation of this technique by artists and others could potentially lead to the breakdown of this system, or at least give the power of "simulation" back to individuals. Certainly this latter is what was beginning to happen in society as personal computers became inexpensive. But, of course, concept was once again leading execution, since the vast majority of artists did not have the computing power to explore true simulation technique.
One of the curious facts that artists quickly discovered about the practical nature of computers, when they were finally able to use them for long periods of time was that, by nature, digital processes are scalable. That meant that, if software was available, whatever could be done on a very large machine could also be done on a very small machine, if the user was willing to wait, and deal with lower resolution. Over the last ten years, this has meant that artists have come to have available to them many of the same tools that simulation scientists use. The significance of this new equality is that the concept/tool gap between science and art has narrowed and even closed in many places; artists are attempting to activate and investigate scientific concepts at the same time, and on the same machines, as the scientists themselves. This has been very noticeable in the controversial area of artificial life. Here, simulation images are both objects of scientific investigation, and at the same time can be used as proofs in scientific argument. A large number of programmer/ artists have been fascinated with this process, which may be either a new paradigm, or a contradiction in an old paradigm discovered in new times, and so have begun to create their own autonomous systems, which artificial life researchers in turn have found of great interest.
Of course, there are many scientists who disapprove of this sort of confusion between spheres of knowledge, claiming that comes from, or leads to, faulty scientific technique, and therefore false scientific knowledge. The issue, of course, is not simply the working relationship between the arts and the sciences, but the very place of digital simulation technology in the sciences. Already, the concept of visual proof is causing considerable difficulty in the mathematical sciences, and is a problem which will not be soon resolved.
As many previously separated parts of human culture are finding that their tools, and indeed very being, have been placed into virtual space, the complications of this controversy are quickly bouncing back and forth between different realms, newly united by the their underlying digital medium. The questions of proper knowledge, proper technique, and proper ethical action interpenetrate with increasing speed, as simulation, like computing, comes to be a dominate force across disparate culture realms.
Now, in the middle 90's, many artists have access to machines with the same functionality and power as their scientific counterparts; certainly the visual computing market is being driven from both sides. In addition, with the advent of networks, the easy availability of high-level, easy to use programming tools, and the advent of "end-user" simulation tools, the technical sophistication of the new digital art community is on the rise. Given this new climate, where ideas are shared quickly, and a certain level of material and technical equality is possible, one can imagine a near future where the relation between simulation-driven sciences and the impractical arts could become very strange, as indeed it has been at several times in the history of science. In terms of general cultural accomplishment, the results could potentially be quite significant. Of course, the opportunities for bad art and bad science will also increase, but those are the usual prices.
From the macro, I'd like to shift to a micro view, in the hope that describing the relation to simulation that I have taken in my own work will help illuminate some of the broad generalities described above.
I come from a video background, starting to work in the medium in 1979, when video was considered a high technology in the arts. As in experimental film in the years before, videoart of the period was very much interested in new images that could be synthesized through manipulation of the video signal. Paradoxically, however, the realistic video image was itself also considered synthetic, virtually reconstructed from an arbitrary, though coherent, image dissection. The telematic idea, that video was a virtual mirror extending across space and time, was also very important at the time, and indeed it was this sense of video as the medium of a virtual world that made some video makers and theorists especially open to the topic of simulation, which was slowly introduced to a wider public during the 1970's.
I began to take the topic of simulation seriously in 1985, when I began work on my first feature film, called "Wax or the discovery of television among the bees (1991, 85:00, Uplink, Tokyo). The subject of the film was a young flight simulation systems engineer who worked for a military flight simulator company based in Alamogordo, New Mexico, close to the site where the first plutonium bomb was tested. The film makes use of a number of different types of virtual world, and uses the subjectivity of the main character, who narrates the film, as the glue which binds these different worlds together. As you might expect, the story is quite strange. Jacob Maker, the protagonist, works on the gunsite displays for a military simulation system, and in his spare time tends strange Mesopotamian bees he inherited from his grandfather, which he keeps in the backyard. Jacob begins to have blackouts while working with his bees, during which he is transported to a artificial world, filled with strange objects, and manipulated video images. This world appears to be gateway to his grandfather's past, where strange events related to the bees, as well as his own future, are unfolding. Jacob abandons his simulation job to follow this more compelling artificial world of the bees, and in doing so wanders away from home, out to the desert, to Trinity Site, test place of the first plutonium bomb, and then beyond, to giant caves beneath the earth, where the bees are awaiting him. At the end of a twisting, and yet coherent story, it appears that Jacob finally becomes the guidance system for a missile used in the Gulf War.
In the film, the definition of what a simulation can be changes quite frequently, which, of course, fits with the polyvalent nature of the topic. Some of these definitions may not seem appropriate in an engineering context, but it is important to keep in mind that these expressions extend from the social uses of the simulation technology which is represented in the film. Since simulation is "seen" and has an effect on thought and action, a psychological aspect can also be included. In "Wax", simulation is the technology used to train the pilots to fly and fight. But it is also the very medium of the Jacob's thought, who constructs a virtual world from perceptions that the bees, who may be inside or outside him, synthesize and pass on to his internal "viewscreen". Thus, in the context of the film, simulation is the mental technology which he uses to reconstruct the story of the past from audiovisual pieces that might either be pieces of his own fantasy, or have some sort of actual reality, having been passed to him by the mysterious bees, who in turn may have either created them, or found them somewhere else.
When Jacob runs across the desert, chasing the bees, he crosses through a US Army missile test reservation, where engineered missiles, created and pre-tested using a variety of simulation technologies, are flight tested under actual conditions on a test range. During these tests, flight telemetry sent from inside the flying rocket is combined with external flight data collected from the extraordinary range of sensors on the range, to recreate this real-world flight as a simulation, which allows final evaluation of the prototyped, as yet virtual product, before full manufacturing begins. This literal refolding of real-world testing into the simulation and production environment is not so much different from the mirrored, intersubjective, and insubstantial interior-simulated world through which Jacob attempts to navigate. In both cases, a culturally determined meta-reality is hard at work.
After finishing the feature, I worked at reconfiguring it for online use, and during the initial stages of the project found a collaborator with an interest in on-line, text-based virtual worlds. The resultant project, called "Wax-web" (http://bug.village.virginia.edu), went up on the World Wide Web in mid-1994. The arranged dataset was quite large, with more that 3000 pages and 25000 hyperlinks used to organize all the original media of the film. The modified MOO software on which the site ran operated both as a object oriented database, rearranging and formatting data on the fly for the client's browser, and as a site for real-time and asynchronous interaction between users. VRML technology made it possible to deliver much of this data through a realtime 3-D interface across the Web. Rhetorically, this project was meant as a sort of narrative simulator, much like the flight simulators that Jacob Maker worked on in the film. The underlying, dynamic database was the landscape of the story, and the web-page was a slow scan virtual display. At the heart of the work was the Utopian concept that mechanical reconfiguration of an underlying narrative database could eventually provide the end-user with new story; rhetorically perhaps not that much different from the simulationist hope that a visual proof, distilled from inhumanely complex, impossible to perceive machine-calculations, can add new knowledge to the world.
Currently I am working on a second feature called "The Telepathic Motion Picture of ‘THE LOST TRIBES’ ", which seems to take place in Japanese-controlled Manchuria in the 1930's, but which actually takes place in a different world, with both an alternate history, and an alternate physics. Much of the film takes place in virtual spaces; the story-world's alternate physics allows the characters a small amount of telepathy, which thus makes all human spaces in the story intersubjective and synthetic. Central to the narrative is the problem of ethical navigation in a knowledge environment where everything, from history to sense of personal self, are constructed through simulation technology, and share in the intellectual project of simulation.
As an individual artist, I am glad to have access to the new functionalities of computer graphics, which currently confuse the difference between video and 3-D virtual space. I am glad that the current intellectual environment brings engineering and scientific knowledge to me quickly, and I find that my work is heavily effected both at the level of technique, and of intellectual direction, which of course can never be separated. I don't do mad science, I only make art, but I wonder if this inscription of my critical ideas can somehow serve as food for the scientific simulation worker, whose discipline has provided me with much intellectual nutrition.
Indeed, it was not until halfway through the digital network premier of "Wax" that the engineers gathered at an office of Sun Microsystems Inc. in Mountain View, Calif., were even able to find the movie signal in the Internet datastream and direct it to play on their color work stations.
And when it finally flickered into view on an eight-inch window within a computer screen, it was clear that digital broadcasting was not yet ready for prime time. In part because of limited data-carrying capacity of the Internet, the movie had only about half the resolution of a normal television image. Surrealer Than Surreal
Even more disorienting, the movie was broadcast at the dream-like rate of two frames a second, instead of the broadcast standard of 24, giving it an even more surreal quality than the big-screen original.
The soundtrack came through haltingly, frequently broken up by what the engineers called "packet drop out" when the Internet became too congested with other data traffic.
Despite the flaws, the engineers at Sun Microsystems said they considered the premier a success.
"We really don't understand the problem of sending thousands of simultaneous digital video signals yet," said Tom Kessler, a Sun software engineer. "Come back in six months and this stuff will be working flawlessly."
Indeed, digital video broadcasting over the Internet is now being developed independently by small groups of researchers at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, the Information Sciences Institute in Los Angeles and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California, and at the corporate laboratories of Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Mass.
MetaVirtue and SubReality 1/5
1. DISNEYLANDIt's 9:45 PM, and I'm walking through New Orleans Square at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. The water show is in full swing, with miraculous sudden set changes. . . . The giant pirate boat with fifty actors has turned and is completely hidden behind a corner too small for it, and multiple thirty-foot evil magic-mirror faces hang on mist screens above the water. I decide to take a sudden turn myself, to visit the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. A few feet down the path, the crowd is gone, and the water show almost inaudible. The ride is on a narrow waterway with flat-bottom boats inexorably driven forward through the artificial landscape by a fearsome chain-and-gear mechanism hidden under the water. I'm in my seat, and twenty seconds later we are underground, on a river in a cave system somewhere beneath Disneyland, somewhere in the Caribbean, probably near the storage space of that missing water-show pirate ship. And, simultaneously, I am almost back in the Carlsbad Caverns National Monument, true wonder of the underworld, alone, after midnight, during the production of my film WAX or the discovery of television among the bees. Floating on a boat attached by bottom chains to an artificial underground Disney-Caribbean river is not that much different from walking alone, at midnight, through the unbelievable underground and path-determined space of Carlsbad Caverns, moving in half-light among giant rock forms. That afternoon, deeper in the cave, I'd had a beekeeper's suit on and been standing around the corner of the one-way path from a cameraman, almost leaning on a fractionally detailed limestone formation. On the cameraman's cue, I was supposed to create a material wipe suddenly by walking around the corner, but we had to keep delaying the shot as tourists kept appearing behind me on the one-way path . . . surprising me, but not themselves. I was just part of the landscape, and several even said, "The moon, huh?" before turning the next corner and finding the camera. I was part of their ride, but they knew I was also thousands of feet underneath the moon, maybe somewhere in France on the set of a Melies movie, or perhaps back at Disneyland, back at Pirates of the Caribbean.
An interesting and vital part of navigation in immersive environments is the effect of sudden mode change . . . often, turning a corner, you are instantly in another environment, as if you had just passed through the spatial equivalent of a soft-edged wipe. What is shocking is that these mode changes can often take you to an environment that contradicts the one you just came from, both in appearance, and in meaning and use . . . like turning a smooth corner at the base of the Matterhorn at Disneyland, and ending up at the end of a row of urinals.
The first effect of this spatial mode change, I believe, is that one becomes more susceptible to association. In other words, free navigation in an immersive environment leads to mode changes, and mode changes lead to an increase in association, sometimes internal, and sometimes external. The latter we call coincidence.
Back in the early 1970s, I learned a lot from surreal audio theater pieces put out by the group Firesign Theatre. I hadn't listened to them for almost twenty years until I bought them as used records, in preparation for a trip to a computer graphics convention called SIGGRAPH '93. Off the plane under the memorial statue at the John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, in an enormous surrounding glass abutment that was the center of a high imperial postmodern building (so obviously built first in the computer that regular holes had been designed in the mold of the parking garage's poured roof to allow what started as elephant feet underground to turn into a grid of optimistic palm trees above), I realized I'd better go to Disneyland before I got too busy. Four hours later, it was closing time at Disneyland, and I was emerging from the bathroom across from the Matterhorn. I'd just bought my first Walkman the month before, and wasn't used to the dual alienation and audio overlay effect you get from a Walkman, so I put the headphones on again with self-conscious semireluctance, and went back to "We're All Bozo's on This Bus" (Firesign Theatre, 1971), written at the beginning of the age of video as an imagination of what government-inflicted simulation might really be like. Putting the story briefly, a bus comes to town, and Clem gets on board. It turns out that the bus is actually a seamless virtual reality environment, that may or may not take Clem to a future amusement park very similar to what I imagine is Ross Perot's vision of the Information Superhighway.
While meeting the audioanimatronic president on the White House Ride, Clem reveals himself as a quasi-revolutionary hacker, who conversationally forces the robot president into maintenance mode, in order to talk to Dr. Memory, the real program running the simulation. Clem is inside the machine, and inside the program, calling out to Dr. Memory: "Read me, Dr. Memory! Read me Dr. Memory!"There's a full moon out, the Matterhorn is white, and the gondola cables are dark and visible against the sky. Suddenly, there's an additional voice and space on the tape, which it takes about ten seconds to identify as coming from the entire southern slope of the Matterhorn, which has begun to speak in the sublime voice of a woman on a microphone saying: "Shutting Down System A. Shutting Down System A. Check. Shutting Down System B. Check." A male voice replies conversationally to the technical woman from another set of speakers across the way. In the meantime, Clem, who had already succeeded in breaking the president, has just shut down the entire Future Fair.
The effect of modal change and association, - whether the latter takes place in the imagination, or in the world as coincidence, is that you end up with a sort of spatial fiction, what Jay Bolter in his book on electronic writing called a topical, or topographic fiction, a fiction of aphorisms and situations, spread in front of you as a field of places that can change from one to the other in a variety of ways. Traveling through the fiction is like navigating through an immersive environment, and vice versa.
2. HAPTIC DIMENSIONS
Navigation through immersive environments is of course a serious problem in the world, an enjoyable problem in amusement parks, and a highly rhetoricized one in virtual worlds. Already, in an amusement park, we are often on the verge of fiction making. By the time we get to virtual reality, we find ourselves in the midst of a full-blown metafiction.
Metafictions have been described as fictions that examine the creation of systems, especially themselves and other fictions, with particular attention to the ways in which these systems transform and filter reality. There is an assumption in this sort of fiction making that we are locked in a world we have created, a fictional world shaped by narrative and subjective forms developed to generate meaning and stabilize our perceptions. Metafictions don't operate on aesthetic assumptions of verisimilitude, but exult in their own ficticiousness. They assume that there are no true descriptions in fiction, only constructions, which may not have any relation to the world.
Navigation in virtual worlds tends to disrupt the ordinary balance that exists between our exterior senses and our interpretive subjectivity. It is no accident that virtual reality has been compared with hallucinogens. LSD, alcohol, fatigue, and lucid dreaming have all provided us with many examples of this disruption, all tending to reveal what I would call the haptic dimensions of thought: a sudden intuition of the material nature of thought, of how thought is received from the environment, and at the same time transforms the environment. Acid trips, for example, are famous for their mode changes, sudden and powerful associations, and constant commentary on themselves, a unified metafictional experience that often leaves the user with the powerful impression that thought is literally another and different physical sense.
Of course, the same effect is common to exhaustion in immersive environments. After the Matterhorn spoke through speakers, I made the very long walk back to my hotel across the famous vast parking lot, past the gate and down a long street with a new sidewalk that switched from one side of the street to the other every block. Four hours off the plane, with miniature golf to one side, the Charismatic Convention Center to the other, and naked power pylons above, I was waiting for the next epiphany, as I could barely tell the difference between Disneyland and California. I received my epiphany in the appearance of a small rectangular concrete cover embedded in, and the same color as, the sidewalk. On the molded top there was engraved the word "telephone," which in the tunnel of my exhaustion made me think too clearly about the power lines invisible under the overlit night street, about my telephone at home, barely lit and unseen by my wife, who was certainly asleep in another room; about the last phone I used to call her, a pay phone back at Disneyland — in general, about both the limits of my knowledge, and the connectedness of words, my thoughts, and the world, and how, in making those connections, my thoughts had acted like a strange sense, seeing things so far away, or impossible to see.
I believe this is related to something the mathematician Poincare said when describing his theory of conventionalism, the main purpose of which was to assert that the space described by the convention of Euclid's theorems did not rule out other spaces with their own self-consistent sets of rules. In certain descriptions of space, he said, there could also be haptic dimensions where every muscle was a dimension.
This thought fascinated people at the turn of the century, and was related by them to the notion that the fourth dimension was an alternate spatial dimension, at right angles to everything we know. In many ways, these enthusiasms were parts of an attempt to deal with subjectivity as a dimension and as a sense — an n-dimensional sense, since with so many possible descriptions, there was no point in stopping the count. Nowadays, with human-computer interface technology, we have come to a literalization of the idea of haptic dimensions. Now, the world can be mapped to muscles, so that a small hand gesture inside a dataglove can be used to navigate, or even to increase the amount of space available in a virtual world.
Speaking about the human-computer interface in his book Virtual Reality, Howard Rheingold says,
“We build models of the world inside our head, using the data from sense organs and the information processing capacity of our brain. We habitually think of the world we see as out there, but what we are really seeing is a mental model, a perceptual simulation that only exists in the brain.That simulation capability is where human minds and digital computers share a potential for synergy.â€
I find it fascinating that Rheingold is not just a great popularizer of virtual reality. He is also a popularizer of lucid dreaming technologies, which allow a dreamer literally paralyzed by sleep to communicate information from a parallel, artificial, and autonomous world out to sleep researchers, using a Morse code of eye wiggles. I take it as a clue that our equivalent of the turn-of-the-century fascination with haptic and higher dimensions can nowadays be found in the theme of potentially autonomous alternate worlds which exist in machines as virtual reality and artificial life, or in our world, as Jurassic Park, and which share among themselves the qualities of metafiction.
3. META JP
In North America, we were already immersed and navigating within Jurassic Park. Of course, Jurassic Park, the film, is only a single interstice within an immersive, navigable environment made up of the various media that Jurassic Park, the concept, is presented in, ranging from wearable shirts and wrappings for burgers at McDonalds to many of the booths at SIGGRAPH, and beyond that to future theme-park rides. Metafictional elements are the audiences' navigation within this environment . . . from product to product, from place to place . . . best emblematized by the film audience's common smile at the only really visible product placement in the entire film: the Jurassic Park memorabilia that can be seen on screen in the Jurassic Park gift shop. Given the fact that the film is part of an immersive environment, this moment is more than an advertisement for itself. It is like the Pirates of the Caribbean (though designed for a more limited and practical effect), a metafiction emblem of navigation, modal change, and potential association used to sell you shirts, or whatever you might want when you decide you want it.
Navigation is an important theme within the film. Richard Attenborough, famous film director in our world, stars as the concept- and money-man behind Jurassic Park, a world within our world where dinosaurs live again. He transports our mam characters to the island in the bellies of helicopters, to see and approve the mystery of his creation. First stop, after a brief witnessing of this creation, is the island's museum movie theater. There everyone is treated to a film within the film, in which Attenborough clones himself to introduce us to the idea of reproduction without sex. Suddenly the movie theater becomes a theme-park ride. Restraining bars come down over the seatbound, a wall opens, and, diorama-style, a living laboratory behind a plate-glass wall begins to scroll past the riders; dinosaur-reproduction workers are visible inside the laboratory. The lawyer character whispers to Richard Attenborough: how marvelous, it's all so realistic . . . are those automatons? Attenborough replies: no, we have no animatronics here. They're real! It is at this moment that the three scientist characters, so taken by this completely immersive environment — there is no question of real or unreal for them! — decide that they have to navigate. Communally, they force up the restraining bars, and exit the ride, cybernetic sailors on this narrative's oceanic pond!
If you've ever seen Mel Brooks's film Blazing Saddles, you'll remember the famous climatic horse chase, whose climax is a sudden modal change, where the chase crashes through a painted landscape backdrop, and finds itself backstage. With no loss of momentum, the riders continue on to the next set, where they disrupt a Busby Berkeley—style movie in mid production. That's how I tend to view the scientist's jump off the ride, as well as the famous scene when the autonomous and artificial Tyrannosaurus rex crashes through the Park's unelectric fence at the beginning of the film's recorded disaster.
Of course, by that point in Jurassic Park, the associative process is already in overdrive. For instance, what are the dinosaurs? Before seeing them, most people already know that they are this age's miracle of computer-generated pseudo-autonomous entertainment reality. In the film, we also learn they are earthburied bone that can be made visible aboveground in the middle of the Badlands of South Dakota through the use of shock waves generated by elephant-gun shells, which create echoes that can be written to computer screens as image-processed pictures. They are DNA held invisible within mosquitoes doubly hidden within miraculous transparent amber buried deep in the earth, which yet can be dug up, extracted, and revealed as equivalent to the wall-to-wall scrolling alphabetic texture that covers the cinema screen in the movie within the movie at the Jurassic Park Museum — DNA letters actually generated during the dinosaur's fateful afterdeath mating with frogs that can change their own sex. I can't even begin to go into the number of descriptive associations this film can generate. To my mind, it is a great associative narrative ¦ a truly atemporal, or should I say spatialized, film.
4. SGI
Which brings us to Jurassic Park, the potential virtual reality. Several weeks after seeing the movie, two days after Disneyland, I found myself at Discovery Park, part of the Silicon Graphics booth at SIGGRAPH '93. It was here that I had a chance to reconsider what I had thought to be one of the most sublime or subliminal elements of the film: the overarching, fractionally dimensional, and ultimately recursive theme best expressed by the main scientist in the phrase "you'll never look at birds the same way again."
If I remember correctly ... at the beginning of the film, we're in the Badlands with the main scientists, digging fossils. The shotgun shell has gone off, revealing the subterranean velociraptor skeleton on their outdoor, but not particularly mobile, computer screen. In the midst of a violently imaginative fleshing out of the dinosaur's previous body and behavior, the scientist says, "You'll never look at birds the same way again." This phrase, stranger than it seems, and said with awareness of its effect, echoes through the film in hundreds of ways, becoming, as if by default, a main theme. Moments after the fatal pronouncement, Richard Attenborough arrives by helicopter to take the scientists to Jurassic Park, where it is their job to judge whether this high-entertainment concept can fit in our world. The park implodes, the dinosaurs riot, and the scientists barely escape . . . but they do, in the belly of a helicopter. At the film's wordless end, the main scientist looks through the clear window, or dead eye, of his artificial bird, and finds what appears to be the sublime in the image of a pelican winding its wings over the ocean beneath him, which, except for an exterior shot of the helicopter in flight, is pretty much the last shot in the film. Despite all the emotion on his face and in the soundtrack, I have to say that I really don't know what it is the scientist sees, but it certainly is a bird.
At SIGGRAPH, the day before I actually did find my way to SGI's Discovery Park, I was standing two halls away in line at the Virtual Reality Laboratory, part of a virtual reality museum ride created for an exhibit called Imaging, the Tools of Science to be installed at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. The visual interface was the Fakespace Boom 2C, a boom-suspended periscope-style cube with a high-resolution stereoscopic display inside . . . more vividly, something like a large, swivelable, realtime ViewMaster at the end of a very fancy articulating lamp stand. Virtual Reality Lab was essentially a fly ride through several surreal and constructed worlds.
First you find yourself in a bare, circular room, with your previously grabbed portrait on the wall, and a polygonally crude Fakespace Boom 2C recursively in front of you. Back in the real world, with the real boom, you can swivel around and look at the room, all the while inexorably advancing toward your portrait, which, at a certain distance, shivers into fragments that flock together and fly through the hole left by their disassembly. You have to follow them, through the hole, to find yourself floating in the clouds. The birds that were ,you, depart ahead and above. To the side is a girder-thick red wire-frame cow, a sort of surrogate cloud, and directly ahead is a structure that once again you are inexorably heading toward and then through, a sort of open-ended floating skyhouse made of four circuit boards in extreme perspective, and a fifth right ahead. The moment before colliding with the fatal frontal board, you can see the image of a flower, and by the miracle of modal change, you find that you have passed through to emerge out of a patch of flowers in the center of a park, a main natural space in a Potemkin village made of textured flats.
All this, seen from the particular angle chosen by the Fakespace user, is also projected on a video screen behind the person standing with head up to the swiveling box. I didn't actually get to put my head up to the box that day, as the line was quite long. Time is always a consideration at SIGGRAPH, and since I didn't have a watch, I turned around to ask the fellow behind me what time it was. Before he started to speak I could see he didn't have a watch, and so I stopped in midsentence, just as he started to say something that I couldn't hear. Out of politeness, I said, "What?" and he said, "Right now," so I said "What?" and he said, "You asked me what time it was, and I said it's right now." I agreed.
Twenty six hours later, just before finally getting to Silicon Graphics' Discovery World, I found myself waiting in line to pay for my lunch at the International Food Court. Again I needed to know what time it was, so I turned around and asked the person behind me. I recognized it was the same fellow just before he inevitably said, "I said, it's right now. Don't you remember?" surprising both of us, as it had been estimated there were 10,000 other people with us in the Anaheim convention center. So, to be polite, as we obviously had something in common, I read his shirt, which said "The Virtual Museum," and asked, "What's the Virtual Museum?" He didn't really want to answer, and I didn't really find out until the next day, when I came across the actual Virtual Museum, back in "Machine Culture," as the art show was known during this SIGGRAPH year. The Virtual Museum being sort of a common interface for inexpensive, individually created virtual worlds, a sort of museum atrium through which one could enter, under arches, any compatible virtual world module you might pick up from the Internet, or a floppy disk. The Virtual Museum describes itself as therefore allowing anyone to explore ancient Egypt, pre-Columbian Peru, and Atlantis. None of this information being offered by my space-time companion at the International Food Court, I decided to push the situation, so I read his convention badge, which always has one's name and job function printed on it at SIGGRAPH . . . apparently he worked for a company called Earth. So I asked, "What's Earth?" and he said, "That's where I live."
After that and lunch, I was off to Discovery Park, where the line was too long, so I talked my way in the back door. "Discovery Park is an Interactive Entertainment and Virtual Reality Experience!" was written on the brochure, and inside, there were birds.
First was a pterodactyl-shaped, user-mountable ride, where a canyon environment appeared on three large high-definition screens in front of the viewer, who steered the flying machine from its virtual back, with wing tips and pterodactyl-head occasionally visible. Everyone in the room could see the screens, and there was a bit of ambiguity whether or not the rider was actually the bird having an out-of-body experience, with the annoyed bird-body continuously attempting to catch the eye of the floating oversoul. Networked to this was the private, two-million-pixel Fakespace Boom 3C, which apparently allowed you to look around while the pterodactyl-person did the steering through the inevitably progressing air. No one else could see what the person at the Fakespace boom saw. Third node on the network was yet another viewpoint, embodied in a high-resolution and also resolutely private head-mounted display from Kaiser Electro-Optics.
People were also looking at birds differently in the Evans and Sutherland booth, which had SIGGRAPH's other user-mountable flying demo ride, a sort of Sports Simulation Gym where your body was a hang-glider spaceship in an extraordinarily complex and enclosed high-definition city space. In the Reagan-Bush years, we would have immediately thought of the military as the buyer or maker of such flying rides, as well as flying things, and uncontrollable carnivores. But now is the time when we instead remember that Link, inventor of the flight simulator, came to that device from his work designing rides for amusement parks.
Link's flight simulator took the roller coaster off the ground using pneumatic motion, making the rider into a bird in a box. Before computer graphics could match the realism of that motion, miniature landscapes were built, reconstructions of appropriate countrysides, which the flight-simulator pilot could see through a motion-controlled camera that floated on a grid above the model board. In this time before computer graphics, many people identified visual simulation with such physical miniatures, so that there it was no great associative leap from the model board to Disneyland. Of course, at that time, one of the logical associative paths leading out of Disneyland was the idea of government-inflicted simulation, presented "In Technical Stimulation," as the Firesign Theatre put it. And certainly, visiting Anaheim's ancient Disneyland, it is very easy to arrive at an idea of the intimate linkage of entertainment and death, especially in New Orleans Square, where Pirates of the Caribbean begins, after establishing the cave, with skeletal pirates guarding gold, and then proceeds through torture and rape to end with an ecstatically drunken pistol duel held in a gunpowder storage cellar.
In Jurassic Park, the single skeptical scientist, overhearing Richard Attenborourgh say that a mechanized tour of Jurassic Park is as safe as any amusement park ride, then volunteers: "But on the Pirates of the Caribbean, if the pirates get loose, they don't eat the tourists." So what should we see when we look at birds flying free as a tyrannosaurus rex through the air?
In WAX or the discovery of television among the bees, Jacob Maker works on a simple, local network of flight simulators, a 1983 precursor to what in 1986 or so became SIMNET, a wide-area simulation networking scheme that allowed a group of pilots sitting in flight simulators somewhere in Tennessee to train with people driving tank simulators in California, all together in the same limited, synthetic environment. This sort of networked simulation prepared the way for the raid on Libya, the invasion of Panama, and ultimately for the Gulf War. The proposed successor to SIMNET is called DSI, or the Distributed Simulation Internet, if I have the correct acronym, which combines broader bandwidth with new graphics and networking standards, literally allowing an army of linked individuals, spread across the globe, to join each other in that military amusement park. Not formally different from what some people propose for interactive, navigable, immersive cable-TV games. Of course, what does program content mean in the context of this DSI?
Or what is history? One of the first implementations of the DSI was a minute-by-minute, foot-by-foot reconstruction of a Gulf War skirmish known as the Battle of 73 Easting. As you might expect, it plays the battle forward and backward, and allows you to view it from any angle. It also allows you to create alternate battles from this reality base. Considering how much history has already been prepared in cyberspace, it is truly metafictional that 73 Easting was presented to the Senate as the first example of virtual history.
Unfortunately, this is a normal theme in the history of the history of technology. Television is an excellent example. According to Steven Spielberg's ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, it was possibly the God of Israel who invented both television and virtual reality. But according to the Nazis and some others, it was Paul Nipkow who discovered television and virtual reality in Berlin in the 1880s. His fascinating electromechanical telephone for the eyes coupled unique spinning-disk spiral scanners, known as image dissectors, with magnetically controlled crystals that occultly served as light valves.
Nipkow worked for the city railroad company during the electrification and "transportification" (a deliberate rhyme with fortification) of Berlin, designing a streetcar semaphore signal system. It is a not so odd fact that his television system mainly resembled the axles and wheels of a railroad car . . . two spinning-disk scanners synchronized by a fixed axle between.
By the 1890s, the signal system was apparently in place, the job had probably settled down, and in his private inventing life, Nipkow had moved on, bypassing further development on the television to focus on his new obsession, the invention of a working helicopter.
More than thirty years later in Weimer Berlin, construction began on the Funkturm, the Eiffel Tower of radio, defining what became the communications heart of Berlin, an area so important that it later was given the name of Adolf Hitler Platz. Nipkow was an old man, and practical, low-resolution, mechanical television systems based on his scanning scheme had come into existence in Germany, Britain, the United States, and elsewhere. This was television with less than forty lines, but it was a commercial television, with regular scheduled broadcasts from the Funkturm by 1929. At that moment, it became clear that the real challenge for television engineers lay in high-resolution television. Breakthroughs in high-frequency research promised broadcast systems and receiver sets with over 400 image lines.
Certain people knew that this same technology would also make possible a practical system of radio-wave-based detection and ranging of distant flying objects — what we know as radar. As a result, as mechanical television died a natural death, due in part to the worsening financial situation worldwide, a decision was made in the three main television-producing countries to promote the creation of a popular, entertainment-oriented high-definition television system; the goal, never publicly stated, was to create both the industrial and human resource base necessary to design and manufacture a practical air-defense system.
This created a peculiar situation. Germany provides the best example. First, Hitler declared all German television research a state secret. Then the public search began for facts that would establish German priority in television research — historical priority. Paul Nipkow was snatched from obscurity to become a new national hero, the Father of Television. England replied, or maybe they started it all, with the Edisonification of John Logie Baird, who became the Other Father of Television.
In every country, television history, like television itself, was discovered, or invented. Books were written, and in other places, factories were built. In 1941, not long after the radar machines were switched on in England, Holland, Germany, and elsewhere, Paul Nipkow died, which triggered his greatest honor. Paul Nipkow's funeral was broadcast live on Fernsehsender Paul Nipkow, the Nazi high-definition television station named after him and broadcasting from atop the Funkturm in Berlin.
5. PARALLEL WORLDS
More than fifty years after Nipkow, or right now, as my more associationally minded colleague from Earth might say, we have mind amplifiers, as Howard Rheingold calls the modern computer. Artificial realities have increased in number, mechanical and immaterial transportation have improved, and with the necessary increase in modal changes have come increases in the descriptive power of association and metafiction. So, again, what should we see when we look at birds? Maybe, metafictionally, they could remind us of a navigational ethics: since the ride is so many different possible things, and since on occasion we are on the other side of the ride, go ahead and go where you are going, in whatever way you wish to travel, just try to remember you are responsible if you kill when you get there. Unfortunately our usual sad situation is very much like that of the religious soul told to remember something after death, who, on arrival in the other world, only remembered once having had a conversation with someone, but not what was said.
Several months ago, at the Cyberspace Conference in Austin, a fellow came up to me and said, ‘Congratulations, I work at Hughes Aircraft, and I used to have the same job as that guy in your film.’ In WAX, a narrative metafiction, Jacob Maker works on the Integrated Air Battle Mission Simulator, writing the code that controls the acquisition of target information. It is up to him to make sure that the gunsight displays work; that what the pilot sees, whether by radar, infrared, or simple sight, does coordinate with his use of weapons. By "congratulations," the fellow from Hughes meant that he used to be Jacob. After twelve to sixteen hours in a completely immersive, photorealistic flying environment, it was time to go outdoors, and as he told me: "I'd go outdoors, just out onto the street, and I'd wonder . . . am I supposed to kill now? And what was really strange, you know, was that after a while, I started seeing these lines. They were just floating in the air, like the marks your guy was seeing in the film." The fellow from Hughes was much happier now, as he had gotten himself transferred out to a part of the company that was trying to find a way to convert flight simulators mto personal amusement-park pods.
Unfortunately, in either entertainment or -war, navigation isn't usually free. It's closer to semi-autonomous. Often, in both, you can go where you want, but only as long as you make sure you kill and spend disposable income. Grotesque narrative dealt with this particular difficulty of navigational ethics in immersive environments long ago, by transferring autonomy to the artificial world ... by stripping the creator of an artificial world of all free will, and passing a parody of that on to his or her creations. Such fictions are invariably metafictions, as there is always a rather smooth continuum from the created and autonomous world to the narrative itself, which, being also a creation, is implicitly also autonomous. This is halfway to recursion, the creation of endless mirrors, or other interfoldings ot space and light, which in metafiction have always led to worlds within worlds, just around the corner from us but burdened with other space-time rules, not just alternate histories, but parallel universes.
When the Jurassic scientist, embedded in the belly of the anonymously piloted helicopter, looks out through the metal bird's window-eye at the free-floating pelican, it is easy for me to make the associative jump to the artificial-life scientists, who watch freely navigating autonomous graphic agents on computer machines, and see life. They claim that automatism, of the kind once given rhetorically in grotesque fictions to describe an ethical dilemma, has now become practical. With this, metafiction becomes perhaps experimentally verifiable. Windows open onto other worlds that might really be there.
The Game of Life is a computer program — a virtual, time-based machine that floats as distributed, changing patterns inside many popular mind amplifiers. This program consists of a small set of rules, a tiny grammar that controls an on/off graphic display of dots clustered together as gridded pixels on the two-dimensional screen you see from outside the machine. The rules turn the pixel dots on and off, and make the dots interact with each other in order to determine the order of this flashing. Some of the patterns resulting from this interaction have the ability to grow and maintain themselves in complicated shapes, which can move through two-dimensional screen space, and even reproduce. Writers and players of the game claim that these dot-group pattern behaviors are mimetic of life itself. They then, on occasion, argue that anything that so clearly imitates life must be alive itself, potentially with a point of view, as part of a limited but autonomous alternate world embedded within our own.
The Game of Life is an example of cellular automata in action. Cellular automata have also been practically applied to image processing. The pictures to be processed in this manner have often been machine gathered and transmitted to us through great noise from places not part of our normal point of view; for instance, the point of view of someone who can read the constituent parts of your blood; or the point of view of a television camera on the top of a rocket plummeting out of control toward the moon. Pictures to be processed are divided into pixels; the grammars go to work on these pixels, forcing them to interact, forcing the picture to become more visible to us. Potentially living, or at least potentially autonomous, pixel groups self-organize into potentially autonomous, substantial, though still changeable image shapes, leaving us with pictures that have more visible information than before the process started.
As cinema collapses into the computer, where it will meet virtual reality, science, and many other residents of our cultural world, we approach a situation where all the film-production data, gathered from places beyond our ordinary point of view, are passed into a unitary workstation. The maker, sitting in front of the workstation screen, works on this data like cellular automata on pixels, forcing various pieces of meaning to interact so that pictures will become more visible to us. However, simultaneously, the maker will also encounter real automata inside the machine.
The maker slowly navigates through the real-time, proto-narrative space of the production data, applying any of a variety of processes to that data, in any sequence desired, controlling composition within frames and between frames interactively, occasionally mixing real-world images with synthetic objects or character elements — all the time composing literal and associative meaning. All processes, from the manipulation of synthetic geometries to the collation of associations, have been partially mechanized, so that the narrative building proceeds with a partial autonomy that allows the workstation screen to look back. The mind amplifier has become a mirror, and at a rhetorical and virtual distance behind the mirror, anti-eyes connected to an anti-body in an alternate universe embedded in ours watch back with a glimmer of narrative intelligence, ready to play you back all the histories of that 73 Easting patch of desert, including the many possible alternate flight paths of semi-autonomous weapons over that part of virtual Iraq…. misguided missiles that are willing to stop and assist you with both spell checking and story building, if that's what the story requires.
In many Japanese newspaper offices, there are old and giant composition typewriters with hundreds of keys for the thousands of pictographic kanji characters. Each key has twenty-one shifts — the Roman alphabet almost hides in a single key. Writers, however, now use personal word processors with the same number of typewriter keys we are used to, that hold both the miniature, alternate Japanese phonetic alphabet, along with the Roman. As you type, the computer collates your pseudo-phonetic strokes, compares them with a built-in kanji chart, and offers you choices of alternate picturewords in a menu at the bottom of the page — a spell checker in reverse, an inadvertent poetry machine mechanizing the processes of association. In cinema, as it slowly collapses into personal computers, kanji are replaced by images and sound, and the semi-phonetic alphabet by your descriptions of your images, the computer offering fill-in-the-blanks association opportunities (or, in less delicate software, spell-checking necessities), to help you get that story into reasonably communicative shape.
Give names to pictures in a semi-intelligent picture processor, and the machine begins to sort the pictures into protosequences.The maker looks at these, chooses the clumpings that are pleasing, perhaps adjusts them a bit, then turns back to the machine, which reapplies its ultimately mutational rules of travel and association, adding organization in several possible ways, which are then again chosen from. Navigation through choices made by the machine soon becomes a primary form of story construction for the maker, who travels through machine-offered potential worlds, choosing the ones that become virtual worlds, leaving a trail of partial and rejected universes behind the maker, who has become a sort of aesthetic eugenicist.
The maker is still on a flat-bottomed boat in Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland, traveling inevitably forward, though in this case building rather than viewing. Whether traveling through alternate worlds, traveling through immersive environments that force the creation of association, or traveling through mechanized association in order to create immersive environments, navigational ethics remain a priority. In the future, when you can go anywhere you want, cinema, by whatever name, will become a grotesquerie without grotesques ... a metafiction where information wants to be free, and stories possessing senses, skills, and resources stutter in and out of existence in digital space-time, on earth and in other worlds. With immersive environments now even embedded within one another, with modal changes available at any moment, and association almost a style of knowledge, it's good to remember, though it may be difficult to remember, what it is you are supposed to remember.
Personally, I work in the area of cinema that I call image-processed narrative: a type of narrative where both the images and the narrative are processed by both myself and machines, and where, in the process, navigational ethics are attempted. So I welcome this, our new protofuture, where the past imitates the future, where metafiction is potentially experimentally verifiable; where, as in the book I read last week, wrinkles in the universal background cosmic microwave radiation led an enviably optimistic popular cosmologist to the conclusion that the universe is alive, that it reproduces, and that as a result there are infinite connected or embedded universes probably related, struggling through the impractical difficulties of evolution in action. A protofuture world where new and old media imitate one another, where the single user is not much different from the single author, and where rhetorical autonomy has been extended to machines — though hopefully, it will be given to people in equal or greater amounts.
from "Journal of the Japan Society for Simulation Technology", 1996.9
from "Journal of the Japan Society for Simulation Technology", 1996.9[background: from 1995-97, I visited at R.A.C.E, the Research in Artifacts Center for Engineering, at Tokyo University... while there, I was asked to contribute to this magazine.]
Simulation and Art
It wasn't until the late 1980's that general-purpose computing finally came to the arts. Of course, many sorts of makers had been experimenting with the machine-qualities of computers since the late 50's, with many of the earlier experiments being centered on device control in the realm of machine-aided sculpture, as well as plotter control for 2-D output. What was generally more influential during this early period was the transmission of concept from the computing community to the arts community. The late '60's were an especially vigorous time for this exchange; for example, many artists were fascinated with the science of information, specifically the description of the relation between information and entropy. In the States, this was a contradictory period both of technological optimism (the Moon landing) and technological disillusionment (the Vietnam War, the growing environmental movement) . In such a climate, art/technology collaboration had important status, with events taking place both with institutional support, and as oppositional practice. It was in this period that changes in technology also allowed electronic (pre-digital) tools, such as video and varied sorts of analog signal processing, into the hands of individuals for the first time. Here again, idea often preceded actual functionality. An interesting example of this is the image-processing school of video-art, which took the concept of early digital image processing (such as pictures from beyond visibility made viewable through the machine) and applied them to their own analog-image manipulations. Paradoxically, after they had passed the analog video image through their hand-made image processing machines, it was often difficult to tell what the original picture had been, a result rather the opposite of what scientists intended with image processing. But the artist's declared intention was a metaphoric image processing, which would make other, normally invisible qualities of the image visible for the first time, through the mediation of the human-controlled machine.
In the mid-1980's, some artists began to work with personal computers. By this time, the concept of simulation had already come to the center of cross-discipline art thinking. It is difficult to unpack the many and often contradictory meanings that simulation took on in the art world, which was in the process of redefining itself as "post-modern". One of the most important thinkers to handle the concept, a French critic named Baudrillard, was well known for a type of writing in which metaphors bounced off one another until finally his presentation seemed to collapse into itself. However, this style was mimetic of his concept of what simulation meant for the modern world... an endless progression of copies, all of which functioned as replacements for the original, in a world where symbols were the only meaning, and yet where meaning was a concept that had irrevocably collapsed and disappeared. However, this idea is not as charged with horror and inaction as it might appear. To Baudrillard's eyes, society was ruled and defined by centralized media that attempted to simulate everything, from human relations to war news, and in which most "simulations" were faulty, actually created to carry lies; however an ironic appraisal and appropriation of this technique by artists and others could potentially lead to the breakdown of this system, or at least give the power of "simulation" back to individuals. Certainly this latter is what was beginning to happen in society as personal computers became inexpensive. But, of course, concept was once again leading execution, since the vast majority of artists did not have the computing power to explore true simulation technique.
One of the curious facts that artists quickly discovered about the practical nature of computers, when they were finally able to use them for long periods of time was that, by nature, digital processes are scalable. That meant that, if software was available, whatever could be done on a very large machine could also be done on a very small machine, if the user was willing to wait, and deal with lower resolution. Over the last ten years, this has meant that artists have come to have available to them many of the same tools that simulation scientists use. The significance of this new equality is that the concept/tool gap between science and art has narrowed and even closed in many places; artists are attempting to activate and investigate scientific concepts at the same time, and on the same machines, as the scientists themselves. This has been very noticeable in the controversial area of artificial life. Here, simulation images are both objects of scientific investigation, and at the same time can be used as proofs in scientific argument. A large number of programmer/ artists have been fascinated with this process, which may be either a new paradigm, or a contradiction in an old paradigm discovered in new times, and so have begun to create their own autonomous systems, which artificial life researchers in turn have found of great interest.
Of course, there are many scientists who disapprove of this sort of confusion between spheres of knowledge, claiming that comes from, or leads to, faulty scientific technique, and therefore false scientific knowledge. The issue, of course, is not simply the working relationship between the arts and the sciences, but the very place of digital simulation technology in the sciences. Already, the concept of visual proof is causing considerable difficulty in the mathematical sciences, and is a problem which will not be soon resolved.
As many previously separated parts of human culture are finding that their tools, and indeed very being, have been placed into virtual space, the complications of this controversy are quickly bouncing back and forth between different realms, newly united by the their underlying digital medium. The questions of proper knowledge, proper technique, and proper ethical action interpenetrate with increasing speed, as simulation, like computing, comes to be a dominate force across disparate culture realms.
Now, in the middle 90's, many artists have access to machines with the same functionality and power as their scientific counterparts; certainly the visual computing market is being driven from both sides. In addition, with the advent of networks, the easy availability of high-level, easy to use programming tools, and the advent of "end-user" simulation tools, the technical sophistication of the new digital art community is on the rise. Given this new climate, where ideas are shared quickly, and a certain level of material and technical equality is possible, one can imagine a near future where the relation between simulation-driven sciences and the impractical arts could become very strange, as indeed it has been at several times in the history of science. In terms of general cultural accomplishment, the results could potentially be quite significant. Of course, the opportunities for bad art and bad science will also increase, but those are the usual prices.
From the macro, I'd like to shift to a micro view, in the hope that describing the relation to simulation that I have taken in my own work will help illuminate some of the broad generalities described above.
I come from a video background, starting to work in the medium in 1979, when video was considered a high technology in the arts. As in experimental film in the years before, videoart of the period was very much interested in new images that could be synthesized through manipulation of the video signal. Paradoxically, however, the realistic video image was itself also considered synthetic, virtually reconstructed from an arbitrary, though coherent, image dissection. The telematic idea, that video was a virtual mirror extending across space and time, was also very important at the time, and indeed it was this sense of video as the medium of a virtual world that made some video makers and theorists especially open to the topic of simulation, which was slowly introduced to a wider public during the 1970's.
I began to take the topic of simulation seriously in 1985, when I began work on my first feature film, called "Wax or the discovery of television among the bees (1991, 85:00, Uplink, Tokyo). The subject of the film was a young flight simulation systems engineer who worked for a military flight simulator company based in Alamogordo, New Mexico, close to the site where the first plutonium bomb was tested. The film makes use of a number of different types of virtual world, and uses the subjectivity of the main character, who narrates the film, as the glue which binds these different worlds together. As you might expect, the story is quite strange. Jacob Maker, the protagonist, works on the gunsite displays for a military simulation system, and in his spare time tends strange Mesopotamian bees he inherited from his grandfather, which he keeps in the backyard. Jacob begins to have blackouts while working with his bees, during which he is transported to a artificial world, filled with strange objects, and manipulated video images. This world appears to be gateway to his grandfather's past, where strange events related to the bees, as well as his own future, are unfolding. Jacob abandons his simulation job to follow this more compelling artificial world of the bees, and in doing so wanders away from home, out to the desert, to Trinity Site, test place of the first plutonium bomb, and then beyond, to giant caves beneath the earth, where the bees are awaiting him. At the end of a twisting, and yet coherent story, it appears that Jacob finally becomes the guidance system for a missile used in the Gulf War.
In the film, the definition of what a simulation can be changes quite frequently, which, of course, fits with the polyvalent nature of the topic. Some of these definitions may not seem appropriate in an engineering context, but it is important to keep in mind that these expressions extend from the social uses of the simulation technology which is represented in the film. Since simulation is "seen" and has an effect on thought and action, a psychological aspect can also be included. In "Wax", simulation is the technology used to train the pilots to fly and fight. But it is also the very medium of the Jacob's thought, who constructs a virtual world from perceptions that the bees, who may be inside or outside him, synthesize and pass on to his internal "viewscreen". Thus, in the context of the film, simulation is the mental technology which he uses to reconstruct the story of the past from audiovisual pieces that might either be pieces of his own fantasy, or have some sort of actual reality, having been passed to him by the mysterious bees, who in turn may have either created them, or found them somewhere else.
When Jacob runs across the desert, chasing the bees, he crosses through a US Army missile test reservation, where engineered missiles, created and pre-tested using a variety of simulation technologies, are flight tested under actual conditions on a test range. During these tests, flight telemetry sent from inside the flying rocket is combined with external flight data collected from the extraordinary range of sensors on the range, to recreate this real-world flight as a simulation, which allows final evaluation of the prototyped, as yet virtual product, before full manufacturing begins. This literal refolding of real-world testing into the simulation and production environment is not so much different from the mirrored, intersubjective, and insubstantial interior-simulated world through which Jacob attempts to navigate. In both cases, a culturally determined meta-reality is hard at work.
After finishing the feature, I worked at reconfiguring it for online use, and during the initial stages of the project found a collaborator with an interest in on-line, text-based virtual worlds. The resultant project, called "Wax-web" (http://bug.village.virginia.edu), went up on the World Wide Web in mid-1994. The arranged dataset was quite large, with more that 3000 pages and 25000 hyperlinks used to organize all the original media of the film. The modified MOO software on which the site ran operated both as a object oriented database, rearranging and formatting data on the fly for the client's browser, and as a site for real-time and asynchronous interaction between users. VRML technology made it possible to deliver much of this data through a realtime 3-D interface across the Web. Rhetorically, this project was meant as a sort of narrative simulator, much like the flight simulators that Jacob Maker worked on in the film. The underlying, dynamic database was the landscape of the story, and the web-page was a slow scan virtual display. At the heart of the work was the Utopian concept that mechanical reconfiguration of an underlying narrative database could eventually provide the end-user with new story; rhetorically perhaps not that much different from the simulationist hope that a visual proof, distilled from inhumanely complex, impossible to perceive machine-calculations, can add new knowledge to the world.
Currently I am working on a second feature called "The Telepathic Motion Picture of ‘THE LOST TRIBES’ ", which seems to take place in Japanese-controlled Manchuria in the 1930's, but which actually takes place in a different world, with both an alternate history, and an alternate physics. Much of the film takes place in virtual spaces; the story-world's alternate physics allows the characters a small amount of telepathy, which thus makes all human spaces in the story intersubjective and synthetic. Central to the narrative is the problem of ethical navigation in a knowledge environment where everything, from history to sense of personal self, are constructed through simulation technology, and share in the intellectual project of simulation.
As an individual artist, I am glad to have access to the new functionalities of computer graphics, which currently confuse the difference between video and 3-D virtual space. I am glad that the current intellectual environment brings engineering and scientific knowledge to me quickly, and I find that my work is heavily effected both at the level of technique, and of intellectual direction, which of course can never be separated. I don't do mad science, I only make art, but I wonder if this inscription of my critical ideas can somehow serve as food for the scientific simulation worker, whose discipline has provided me with much intellectual nutrition.
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