Platt, John B, All
I'm again immersed in "the Art of the Novel" this time a new one by
Richard Powers titled "Plowing in the Dark" which plays the experiences
of a band of virtual-reality researchers in one white room off the
plight of a hostage in the Middle East experiencing a quite different
white room.
The novel starts with a "traditional" artist (in the sense of real
subjects, real media, real paper, canvas etc.) who has given up on "Art"
and is now making a living as a commercial illustrator. She is
approached by an old friend to join the virtual-reality team because of
her obvious skills. Of course she's initially appalled at the idea of
computer "art" but of course is seduced in the first 30 pages. But as
she's trying to learn the basics of computer generated reality and
frustrated with need for wireframe, primitives, polygons, hidden line
removal, she asks:
"Could we just go out a shoot 360 degrees of film around some actual leaf?"
"Could. But you'd still want to translate the picture back into data
points. And you'd have to do that by hand, or something like it."
"Why?" Adie asked. " Why turn a continuous image of a real thing back
into jagged little chunks?"
"Because," Spiegel began, running the logic though his own internal
simulation, like sunlight though foliage. "Because we'll want to give
your leaf real qualities. Behaviors. We'll want to run operations
against it. To subject it to gravity,fire, wind. A photo of a leaf won't
ooze when cut. We want a clone that will do everything the original
does. Catch rain or shrivel in the heat. Turn gold in a cold snap."
A leaf's "real qualities"? This now jumps off the page for me. Four or
five years ago my response to this question would have been color,
shape, size, texture etc. Now it would be the underlying values that
make all these phenomena and many others possible. The reality beyond
the surface that all artists explore. Pirsig may not ultimately be
right, but he certainly is Good.
3WD
PS. Shaping up to be a good read, recommended.
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