Re: [-empyre-] Welcome Jim Andrews re: Electronic Poetry

[Simon Biggs <simon@littlepig.org.uk>]

On 04.05.03 06:07, "fizzion" <fizzion@optusnet.com.au> wrote:

> I am curious to know why you find the one-on-one experiencing of the piece
> problematic. Its interesting to note that we are all essentially alone, as
> Thomas Merton observed, and also that one on one 'conversations' sometimes
> provide the intimacy that allows more deeply felt meaning to be be
> discovered and shared.
-----
It is something to do with my own artistic agenda. I am not interested in
people interacting with machines - or even art. I am interested in how
people interact with one another and thus bring themselves into being. Of
course, this can be done remotely and that is what happens when people
interact with one another via an artwork. In that instance you have author
and reader interacting.

My interest has always been in shifting these roles around and key to this
is creating a situation where everyone is interacting with everyone else,
all at the same time. To blur the roles of author/reader you also have to
de-differentiate the individual.

VR based work has thus rarely interested me as its focus has usually been
consumed with the individual sensory experience rather than the collective
process of bringing things, including the self, into being. That is to say,
conventional VR is constrained by the positivist and Cartesian dualities
that have dominated our culture for so long. I prefer works that challenge
these "certainties" or even achieve escape velocity.

In a work like Babel this is explicit where I take something like the
"problem of point of view" that is central to VR and choose neither of the
conventional solutions (1. Averaged point of view for all viewers; 2. One
lead point of view) but instead set it up so that all the viewers points of
view are visible to all the viewers at all times as a shared kaleidoscope of
difference and emergent chaos. This sort of suits my political views as
well.

Although Char Davies work has valuable elements (its use of organic and
non-Euclidean geometries, a focus on unusual sensory modes, etc) it is still
functioning within the dualities I refer to above and can be seen as part of
a recent history of (computer) visualisation that is reactionary in the
extreme when compared to where things like vision, the constitution of self,
etc, have been developed over the last century. I don't think many
philosophers or creative thinkers hang out at places like Siggraph, which to
me seems the natural home of Osmose.

I do not agree with Thomas Merton. The individual can be regarded as nothing
more than an abstract instance of the linguistic potential that is human
society, the collective. This relates to an earlier theme in this thread,
concerning language and systems. It is where Goedel and Foucault might meet.

best

Simon


Simon Biggs

simon@littlepig.org.uk
http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
http://www.greatwall.org.uk/
http://www.babel.uk.net/

Research Professor
Art and Design Research Centre
Sheffield Hallam University, UK
s.biggs@shu.ac.uk
http://www.shu.ac.uk/