Site Meter dotAtelier: Dezember 2005

dotAtelier

The construction of reality through art, language and programming. Virtual reality as artistic practice.


Einträge "Dezember 2005":

Freitag, 16. Dezember 2005

Space and perception

Space depends on movement for its existence. Without movement, the eye does not present us with space but just a visual surface. For the sensation of touch to provide spatial relationships our muscles have to move a touch sensitive surface such as finger tips across a surface or an object. 

Space, perspective and 3 dimensions depend on the perceiving organism moving its eyes and limbs around to map its surroundings. Through movement, space is activated and constructed.

Interpersonal concepts of space arise in organisms in motion and through communication with one another. With cultural history, complex notions of space have been built up, which originate in the movement.

A concept of space “out there” is constructed, giving an apparent simplicity and self-evident feeling of moving in three dimensions with others along a thread of time. This is however not a simple construct, but depends of billions of years of species development and learning to give a human-specific space feeling. We live in human-space.

For a computer to reconstruct this history for itself, it has a lot to learn. It must know that one point is next to another, or not. It needs to recognise layers in space, movement across layers and movement of multiple points within a layer. Eventually, with enough information, a computer or an implanted computer will be able to generate the sensation of being in space. Potentially it could generate bee-space, amoeba-space, or a bird-space for a human with the appropriately programmed implant. Their human-space would be suspended.

An artist's representation of space is informed by their own construction of space. It is essentially their own system of representation that is their object. This appears to be “out there”.

(ref.: Jakob von Uexküll Theoretische Biologie)

Autor: dotAtelier in: themes

Donnerstag, 8. Dezember 2005

Caves, art and consciousness

Caves play a special role in reflecting on the relationship between the world within and the world "outside". Plato's cave metaphor for perception generally explains how we construct systems from the limited sensations which we have access to. The prisoners of the cave constructed their world on the basis of shadows on the wall.

Robert Ryan ascribes a significance to caves in antiquity as an exploration of the inner world, that which could be seen with "eyes turned inwards". He argues that the Shaman of antiquity was both a wise person and an artist. There were no other artists than the shamans. Art was a representation of symbolic animals on cave walls not real ones. The content of art was not copying empirical reality, but exploring the inner constructing consciousness and its forms. An animal is rendered as its spirit, its essence, its beauty in motion, rather than a hunting scene where animals are being killed or eaten.

Artists should have the skills to show others about themselves. Radically different life-experience is requiered. The shaman-artists knew death through their own near death experiences and could express it visually / multimedially. Caves lead into the unknown underworld and were places of initiation. Therefore they were appropriate places for the placement of such visual forms.

Art is essentially the expression of the reality-construction potential, not of reality itself.

Software has its own version of the eyes turned inward / outward. The GUI is the visible layer with its own design quality. The underlying code is the unconscious, the presupposed, the underlying reality construction principles. Code seeks to construct a reality-appearance, often modelled on the constructed worlds of everyday life and business but often also a virtual world of its own. The artist as programmer, programmer as artist, has the level of sensual stimulation and its underlying complexity as tools.

Autor: dotAtelier in: themes
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