Re: [-empyre-] multi-perspectival / cultural hegemony of space

[John Klima <klima@echonyc.com>]

adam+,

i was refering to the wires in ref to the perception of the space as
being other than cartesian. as a person intimately involved with the
medium, it becomes difficult to see it freshly. the same holds true for
vid games, i look very intently at how they put together the scene, i
make guesses as to how it was programmed, i look for things to steal.
your average consumer of vid games prolly doesn't do this, and prolly
tries very hard to avoid noticing the cracks in their fantasy. so in a
sense the suspension of disbelief is a form of denial really.

the case of age of empires, or revisionist history through realistic
rendering techniques and ultimately through an interface, we see a
problematic state i make reference to in my works "the great game" and
"tgg - iraq expansion pack and campaign maker v1.0." its a disturbing
trend towards a completely mediated experience, where real world events
are experienced in real time, through an interface rather than in the
flesh. but history has always been relative, the winner always writes
the books, and one cant really expect the new mediums to be less subject
to this phenomenon.

yeah, "realistic fairies" is a particularly humorous oxymoron. as far as
fairies being submissive and possesing physical traits found most
appealing to a certain segment of the population, well, no big surprise
there either. when i was beta testing everquest, i played a female wood
elf cause she had the nicest ass.

however, the notion of a realistic fairy, to me, is at the heart of what
attracts me to the medium. in her world, the world rendered and existing
inside the machine, she *is* real. i have very loose standards when it
comes to the turing test. i don't suspend my disbelief when in a digital
3d world, i simply accept it as a parallel universe. the computer is
simply the window into that world. it falls down when i see the
construction, but even then i can still forgive the creators.

best,
j

Adam Nash wrote:
> 
> >the "oeil complex" piece is very nice, but perhaps my intimate knowledge
> >about how these things are built prevents me from suspending my
> >disbelief. i see the "wires" or in this case the polygons holding the
> >shape together. however i'll definitely concede that someone without my
> >particular esoteric experience would indeed see something considerably
> >more confounding.
> 
> Interesting reaction - I thought that the artist was not attempting to hide
> the 'wires', especially as you can see the polygons in some of the states
> that mouse-clicking produces. I found the effect to be heightened precisely
> because you CAN see the wires, yet still the effect is moving. (Just like
> when I listen to any piece of music, electronic or not, and I can
> individually discern all of the instruments and sounds being used, but it
> doesn't lessen the transformative experience of beholding the music itself).
> 
> To me, this point introduces the 'realism' argument, where the 3D graphics
> industry has become completely, and very unhealthily IMHO, obsessed with
> trying to trick the eye, which is such an old fashioned idea. At a number
> of recent demos, nVidia have been showing how 'realistically' their new
> cards can render a fairy. There are major problems for me with this. First,
> and most obviously, is the problem that fairies don't exist in the very
> reality that the card is supposedly rendering a 'realistic' version of, so
> how can it be paraded as an example of this so-called realism. Second, of
> course the fairy was white skinned, female, big gravity-defying breasts,
> and looked very submissive and altogether totally unlike any 'realistic'
> woman. So, what we're dealing with is not a 'realistic' rendering of
> reality at all, but an attempt to use the appearance of so called
> photorealism to further the hegemony of white males and the existing power
> structures. It can be seen very clearly in many games. Further, it is
> coming into play (with things like Age of Empires, etc) as a tool to
> reinforce particular readings of history, by using 'realistic' rendering as
> some kind of implied evidence.
> 
> Thirdly, I don't believe that any person's brain is ever, even for a
> nanosecond, actually believing that what they are seeing is 'reality'. The
> much vaunted 'suspension of disbelief' is a myth in my opinion: there is no
> 'suspension', rather a very conscious, and quite sophisticated, dualism or
> multiplicity of perception. Because of this, I think there is a much
> greater chance of producing moving art by not worrying about whether the
> 'wires' can be seen or not.
> 
> Adam
> 
> >j
> >
> >
> >Jim Andrews wrote:
> > >
> > > hi john,
> > >
> > > the space we walk around in every day is whatever it is. pretty
> > mysterious stuff. euclidean and
> > > non-euclidean geometries are models of space. maps are not the
> > territory, as we know. maybe
> > > there are fat creatures several light years in diameter that have
> > non-euclidean intuition. i
> > > wonder if they're on any lists? because that scale of things seems to
> > be where the non-euclidean
> > > turns into the quotidian. or maybe with very fast beasties that travel
> > at some significant
> > > proportion of the speed of light.
> > >
> > > i suspect that 'seeing 4d space' is not so much a matter of actually
> > seeing it as knowing its
> > > properties well enough that one can imagine how things change and look
> > from various
> > > perspectives, sort of like being able to play chess without looking at
> > the board, which is of
> > > course possible. 3(r)d eye stuff.
> > >
> > > it's true that what we're looking at at the moment is a monitor that is
> > flat and is programmed
> > > with euclidean space very much in mind. but did you check out that
> > durieu piece? there's an
> > > intelligable space made very imaginative via a complex mapping. Nice
> > puns in the title, too:
> > > "Oeil Complex", the complex of eyes, the reference to complex analysis
> > and i.
> > >
> > > i think that the use to artists of non-euclidean geometries and
> > godelian philosophies and so on
> > > is mainly to become a fat creature several light years in diameter but
> > to phone home frequently.
> > > to not play by the book, anyway.
> > >
> > > Poemy poems in space:
> > > http://vispo.com/writings/poems/alice.htm
> > >
> > http://vispo.com/writings/SeveralNumbersThroughtheLyric/TheMeetingPlaceII.pdf
> > >
> > > the 'cultural hegemony' of euclidean space will probably not be
> > challenged soon by the fatties,
> > > it's true. just the 'intellectual hegemony' maybe.
> > >
> > > ja
> > >
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