[-empyre-] John Klima - intro

[John Klima <klima@echonyc.com>]

heya all,

many of you already know me from this and other lists, but for those who
don't, a brief intro will suffice. I've just resurfaced from two weeks
of programming seclusion, not in web3d but in 3d on the handheld gameboy
device. Let me tell ya, that is a great platform for 3d. nearly infinite
worlds in your pocket, such a nice metaphor. and no nagging tech issues
cause every gameboy is identical, if it runs on one it runs on them all.

as my bio states, i've been coding 3d since around 1978, making me the
oldest of the old-timers, though i was 12 at the time, so i'm hardly a
gray-haired old man. i went to art school, studied photo mostly, but did
alot of sculptural work too. i switched to computers as my primary
medium around 1990, when the first CAD programs and primitive
ray-tracers surfaced. as a photographer i was primarily concerned with
still life and constructed realities, so the computer offered solutions
to nagging real world problems - i no longer needed to suspend things
with wires, no longer had to frantically search for the right object for
my scene, i could just "make it" from scratch. and then the machine
added an additional element that still photography and even film or
video could never achieve, real-time animation and interaction. though
in film you have the element of time and certainly of narrative, it is
nonetheless, a contained time. there is a beginning, middle, and end. on
the machine there is no such constraints, it is potentially endless, and
the only time is "right now" time.

i have participated in Web3dArt since its inception, first submitting
work executed in WorldUp, a proprietary high performance 3d IDE, but in
the last few years for web work i have switched to java, implementing
with the anfy3d api and most recently, the idx3d api. Though WorldUp is
as powerful as any game engine, and indeed one could create work on par
with anything in the gaming industry (compatible budget and human
resources not withstanding), for a general audience on unpredictable
hardware configurations, native java allows the widest possible
compatibility and no plug-in whatsoever. in the end, compromising visual
quality and performance for broad accessibility made the most sense for
web distribution.

i'm nonetheless fond of the real world, so i often combine the virtual
and the real with physical installation. i create parallel physical and
virtual worlds, each echoing elements of the other. the physical
installations are usually mechanized, and controlled by the virtual
world, through great effort. it is remarkable how easy it is to
"mechanize" a virtual space, and how hard it is to mechanize a real one.

Below is a list of urls, i suggest you start with the first - it
provides a complete overview of all the work i've executed in the past
few years, rather than introduce all the pieces here.

General URL:
http://www.cityarts.com/lmno		get everywhere from here

Java URLS:
http://www.rhizome.org/Context_Breeder	genetic database interface
http://www.cityarts.com/konstanz	proposal for library interface
http://www.cityarts.com/greatgame	invasion of afghanistan
http://www.cityarts.com/iraq		invasion of iraq
http://www.cityarts.com/colorado	data visualization


WorldUp URLS:
http://www.glasbead.com			multi-user music interface
http://www.cityarys.com/ecosystm	global market simulation
http://www.cityarys.com/earth		planetary visualization


best,
j