[-empyre-] Re: space and representation

[Adrian Miles <adrian.miles@uib.no>]

At 12:01 PM +1100 12/3/02, Jun-Ann Lam wrote:
> I think this comment of yours definitive of online/computer screen
> experience. Trying to grapple with its limits is most frustrating and still
> I am not any closer to resolution. IS this then something we have to
> accept...that online experience is not spatial, it does not physically
> envelop you.

some suggestive asides in there that have triggered some ideas of my own...

though as others have pointed out this doesn't have to be the case 
(books). but scale is a major issue. it's the difference between 
watching a movie in the local cineplex on the big screen with the 
full sound effects and watchign the same thing on dvd at home, or on 
vhs. on the domestic telly. but we do, and can.

and i guess we'd also need to tease out whether envelopment in space 
= immersion in the diegetic world. books suggest not. tv suggests 
not. i suspect this is much more about the user than the medium of 
presentation. and that might become a problem of having a language to 
engage audiences in the sense of knowing what they're engaging with. 
(people see first movie of train, and flee, well probably didn't, but 
audiences need to learn a medium and a medium needs to learn itself.)

and things like 3d have a double bind here. those that write in the 
medium know how to read it, even if they think the narrative or the 
world sucks they can read the work behind the work (literally and 
figuratively) and so that nifty bit of code and what it achieves is 
'immserive' for such people. while joe public just sees a semi 
transparent blob that seems to keep following them...

> It brings me to something that the tdfsb is trying to do...create a 3d
> experience of the inside of a computer. Interesting idea. But wouldn't it
> have so much more impact if it were actually projected in a room as a 3d
> space which the user walks into? There is also much to be said for SCALE.

and in electronic environments there is much to be said for 
variability of scale. :-) i think one of the biggest things that work 
online needs to deal with (and learn to treat as a positive 
constraint) is that variability is a given. even if he world ran on 
21 inch monitors you'd still have things like the gamma problem 
across platforms (for instance), variable band width. it's the 
decision of whether you regard your work as networked or not. if the 
former then this is the natural ecology of your work.

> Isn't 3D far more engaging if experienced in an actual 3D space? To
> represent it in a 2D format flattens that third Dimension? If so, why would
> an artist even bother to put in on a computer screen?
>
> Many works simply do not lend themselves to the online medium. If I can't
> see your piece in the flesh, I will never experience it as it was meant to
> be experienced. I am a have not.

nah :-) this is the condition of most art anyway so i reckon we 
should just get over it. shakespeare, we don't expeience that as it 
was intended, the mona lisa, same gig, sistine chapel? most films 
(tv, poor projection, variability between prints), music (anything 
recorded?). books are perhaps the safest bet here because their 
medium of transmission (print on paper) is usually treated as 
secondary by the artist. (not may authors can argue typography with 
their book designers.)

cheers :-)

adrian miles
--
   
+  lecturer in new media and cinema studies 
[http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/vlog]
+  interactive desktop video developer  [http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/]
+ media studies. rmit [http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au]
+ InterMedia:UiB. university of bergen [http://www.intermedia.uib.no]