18 research outputs found
FACING EXPERIENCE: A PAINTER’S CANVAS IN VIRTUAL REALITY
Full version unavailable due to 3rd party copyright restrictions.This research investigates how shifts in perception might be brought about through the development of visual imagery created by the use of virtual environment technology.
Through a discussion of historical uses of immersion in art, this thesis will explore how immersion functions and why immersion has been a goal for artists throughout history. It begins with a discussion of ancient cave drawings and the relevance of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Next it examines the biological origins of “making special.” The research will discuss how this concept, combined with the ideas of “action” and “reaction,” has reinforced the view that art is fundamentally experiential rather than static. The research emphasizes how present-day virtual environment art, in providing a space that engages visitors in computer graphics, expands on previous immersive artistic practices.
The thesis examines the technical context in which the research occurs by briefly describing the use of computer science technologies, the fundamentals of visual arts practices, and the importance of aesthetics in new media and provides a description of my artistic practice. The aim is to investigate how combining these approaches can enhance virtual environments as artworks. The computer science of virtual environments includes both hardware and software programming. The resultant virtual environment experiences are technologically dependent on the types of visual displays being used, including screens and monitors, and their subsequent viewing affordances. Virtual environments fill the field of view and can be experienced with a head mounted display (HMD) or a large screen display. The sense of immersion gained through the experience depends on how tracking devices and related peripheral devices are used to facilitate interaction.
The thesis discusses visual arts practices with a focus on how illusions shift our cognition and perception in the visual modalities. This discussion includes how perceptual thinking is the foundation of art experiences, how analogies are the foundation of cognitive experiences and how the two intertwine in art experiences for virtual environments. An examination of the aesthetic strategies used by artists and new media critics are presented to discuss new media art. This thesis investigates the visual elements used in virtual environments and prescribes strategies for creating art for virtual environments. Methods constituting a unique virtual environment practice that focuses on visual analogies are discussed. The artistic practice that is discussed as the basis for this research also concentrates on experiential moments and shifts in perception and cognition and references Douglas Hofstadter, Rudolf Arnheim and John Dewey.
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Virtual environments provide for experiences in which the imagery generated updates in real time. Following an analysis of existing artwork and critical writing relative to the field, the process of inquiry has required the creation of artworks that involve tracking systems, projection displays, sound work, and an understanding of the importance of the visitor. In practice, the research has shown that the visitor should be seen as an interlocutor, interacting from a first-person perspective with virtual environment events, where avatars or other instrumental intermediaries, such as guns, vehicles, or menu systems, do not to occlude the view. The aesthetic outcomes of this research are the result of combining visual analogies, real time interactive animation, and operatic performance in immersive space.
The environments designed in this research were informed initially by paintings created with imagery generated in a hypnopompic state or during the moments of transitioning from sleeping to waking. The drawings often emphasize emotional moments as caricatures and/or elements of the face as seen from a number of perspectives simultaneously, in the way of some cartoons, primitive artwork or Cubist imagery. In the imagery, the faces indicate situations, emotions and confrontations which can offer moments of humour and reflective exploration. At times, the faces usurp the space and stand in representation as both face and figure. The power of the placement of the caricatures in the paintings become apparent as the imagery stages the expressive moment. The placement of faces sets the scene, establishes relationships and promotes the honesty and emotions that develop over time as the paintings are scrutinized.
The development process of creating virtual environment imagery starts with hand drawn sketches of characters, develops further as paintings on “digital canvas”, are built as animated, three-dimensional models and finally incorporated into a virtual environment. The imagery is generated while drawing, typically with paper and pencil, in a stream of consciousness during the hypnopompic state. This method became an aesthetic strategy for producing a snappy straightforward sketch. The sketches are explored further as they are worked up as paintings. During the painting process, the figures become fleshed out and their placement on the page, in essence brings them to life. These characters inhabit a world that I explore even further by building them into three dimensional models and placing them in computer generated virtual environments. The methodology of developing and placing the faces/figures became an operational strategy for building virtual environments. In order to open up the range of art virtual environments, and develop operational strategies for visitors’ experience, the characters and their facial features are used as navigational strategies, signposts and methods of wayfinding in order to sustain a stream of consciousness type of navigation.
Faces and characters were designed to represent those intimate moments of self-reflection and confrontation that occur daily within ourselves and with others. They sought to reflect moments of wonderment, hurt, curiosity and humour that could subsequently be relinquished for more practical or purposeful endeavours. They were intended to create conditions in which visitors might reflect upon their emotional state,
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enabling their understanding and trust of their personal space, in which decisions are made and the nature of world is determined.
In order to extend the split-second, frozen moment of recognition that a painting affords, the caricatures and their scenes are given new dimensions as they become characters in a performative virtual reality. Emotables, distinct from avatars, are characters confronting visitors in the virtual environment to engage them in an interactive, stream of consciousness, non-linear dialogue.
Visitors are also situated with a role in a virtual world, where they were required to adapt to the language of the environment in order to progress through the dynamics of a drama. The research showed that imagery created in a context of whimsy and fantasy could bring ontological meaning and aesthetic experience into the interactive environment, such that emotables or facially expressive computer graphic characters could be seen as another brushstroke in painting a world of virtual reality
How sketches work: a cognitive theory for improved system design
Evidence is presented that in the early stages of design or composition the
mental processes used by artists for visual invention require a different type of
support from those used for visualising a nearly complete object. Most research
into machine visualisation has as its goal the production of realistic images which
simulate the light pattern presented to the retina by real objects. In contrast sketch
attributes preserve the results of cognitive processing which can be used
interactively to amplify visual thought. The traditional attributes of sketches
include many types of indeterminacy which may reflect the artist's need to be
"vague".
Drawing on contemporary theories of visual cognition and neuroscience this
study discusses in detail the evidence for the following functions which are better
served by rough sketches than by the very realistic imagery favoured in machine
visualising systems.
1. Sketches are intermediate representational types which facilitate the
mental translation between descriptive and depictive modes of representing visual
thought.
2. Sketch attributes exploit automatic processes of perceptual retrieval and
object recognition to improve the availability of tacit knowledge for visual
invention.
3. Sketches are percept-image hybrids. The incomplete physical attributes
of sketches elicit and stabilise a stream of super-imposed mental images which
amplify inventive thought.
4. By segregating and isolating meaningful components of visual
experience, sketches may assist the user to attend selectively to a limited part of a
visual task, freeing otherwise over-loaded cognitive resources for visual thought.
5. Sequences of sketches and sketching acts support the short term episodic
memory for cognitive actions. This assists creativity, providing voluntary control
over highly practised mental processes which can otherwise become stereotyped.
An attempt is made to unite the five hypothetical functions. Drawing on the
Baddeley and Hitch model of working memory, it is speculated that the five
functions may be related to a limited capacity monitoring mechanism which makes
tacit visual knowledge explicitly available for conscious control and manipulation.
It is suggested that the resources available to the human brain for imagining nonexistent
objects are a cultural adaptation of visual mechanisms which evolved in
early hominids for responding to confusing or incomplete stimuli from immediately
present objects and events. Sketches are cultural inventions which artificially
mimic aspects of such stimuli in order to capture these shared resources for the
different purpose of imagining objects which do not yet exist.
Finally the implications of the theory for the design of improved machine
systems is discussed. The untidy attributes of traditional sketches are revealed to
include cultural inventions which serve subtle cognitive functions. However
traditional media have many short-comings which it should be possible to correct
with new technology. Existing machine systems for sketching tend to imitate nonselectively
the media bound properties of sketches without regard to the functions
they serve. This may prove to be a mistake. It is concluded that new system
designs are needed in which meaningfully structured data and specialised imagery
amplify without interference or replacement the impressive but limited creative
resources of the visual brain
Plotting the sixties : the culture of conspiracy in the USA.
This dissertation explores how the discourse of conspiracy shaped and was itself
shaped by the cultural and political landscape of the USA during the 1960s. It focuses
on the popular engagement with notions of conspiracy in four key areas, namely
postmodernism, feminism, the counterculture, and gay rights. Broadly speaking, it
traces the way those groups who had previously been the object of demonological
scrutiny began in the sixties to tell conspiracy theories about those in power-and
about each other. It is concerned with "plotting" both as a form of conspiratorial
organisation, and as a narrative device. Through close readings of the poetics of
conspiracy in both factual and fictional texts, this thesis aims to bring together "realist"
and "symbolist" approaches to the "paranoid style" in American culture.
It consists of four interrelated case studies, each of which examines key texts
from around 1963, in conjunction with works from the 1990s which rethink the earlier
representations. The first chapter explores how conspiracy theories have mounted a
challenge not just to the official "lone gunman" version of the assassination of
President Kennedy, but to the "authorised version" of the 1960s themselves. Through a
reading of Don DeLillo's Libra (1988) and Oliver Stone's JFK (1992), I argue that
narratives about the conspiratorial activities of the authorities have contributed to a
crisis in the authority of narrative, making the Kennedy assassination both a symptom
and a cause of a postmodern culture of paranoia. The second chapter considers the
figuration of conspiracy in popular American feminist writing, from Betty Friedan' s
The Feminine Mystique (1963) to Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth (1990). I argue that
conspiracy tropes have functioned not only to link the personal and the political, but
also to establish a series of implicit divisions within American feminism. The next
chapter traces the emergence of a self-conscious engagement with the culture of
conspiracy in the sixties through the career of Thomas Pynchon. I then examine what
has happened to the conspiracy culture of the sixties, through an analysis of Vineland
(1990). I argue that the earlier paranoid "depth" of secrecy has been flattened out by
the proliferation of the signs of mass culture. The final chapter concentrates on the
highly idiosyncratic paranoid fictions of William S. Burroughs. My aim is not so much
to diagnose him as to locate his writings within postwar discourses of homosexuality,
drug addiction and disease. I examine how his novels of the sixties rework the notion
of paranoia as an externalisation of private fears by highlighting the internalisation and
even the literal incorporation-of public surveillance. I then consider the
possibilities and pitfalls of reading Burroughs in the light of the HIV/AIDS epidemic,
and conversely, of reading his novels as a map of the contemporary culture of body
panic
Gilbert Simondon: Media and Technics
Special issue of Platform: Journal of Media and Communicatio
ASTRAL PROJECTION: THEORIES OF METAPHOR, PHILOSOPHIES OF SCIENCE, AND THE ART O F SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION
This thesis provides an intellectual context for my work in computational
scientific visualization for large-scale public outreach in venues such as digitaldome
planetarium shows and high-definition public television documentaries. In
my associated practicum, a DVD that provides video excerpts, 1 focus especially on
work I have created with my Advanced Visualization Laboratory team at the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (Champaign, Illinois) from
2002-2007.
1 make three main contributions to knowledge within the field of computational
scientific visualization. Firstly, I share the unique process 1 have pioneered for
collaboratively producing and exhibiting this data-driven art when aimed at popular
science education. The message of the art complements its means of production:
Renaissance Team collaborations enact a cooperative paradigm of evolutionary
sympathetic adaptation and co-creation.
Secondly, 1 open up a positive, new space within computational scientific
visualization's practice for artistic expression—especially in providing a theory of
digi-epistemology that accounts for how this is possible given the limitations
imposed by the demands of mapping numerical data and the computational models
derived from them onto visual forms. I am concerned not only with liberating
artists to enrich audience's aesthetic experiences of scientific visualization, to
contribute their own vision, but also with conceiving of audiences as co-creators of
the aesthetic significance of the work, to re-envision and re-circulate what they
encounter there. Even more commonly than in the age of traditional media, on-line
social computing and digital tools have empowered the public to capture and
repurpose visual metaphors, circulating them within new contexts and telling new
stories with them.
Thirdly, I demonstrate the creative power of visaphors (see footnote, p. 1) to
provide novel embodied experiences through my practicum as well as my thesis
discussion. Specifically, I describe how the visaphors my Renaissance Teams and I
create enrich the Environmentalist Story of Science, essentially promoting a
counter-narrative to the Enlightenment Story of Science through articulating how
humanity participates in an evolving universal consciousness through our embodied
interaction and cooperative interdependence within nested, self-producing
(autopoetic) systems, from the micro- to the macroscopic. This contemporary
account of the natural world, its inter-related systems, and their dynamics may be
understood as expressing a creative and generative energy—a kind of
consciousness-that transcends the human yet also encompasses it
URSS Event Program Booklet 2017
This event program booklet contains a schedule of the event, list of awards, and student abstracts
Gilbert Simondon: Media and Technics
Special issue of Platform: Journal of Media and Communication on Gilbert Simondo
Evolution: From Big Bang to Nanorobots
The present volume is the fourth issue of the Yearbook series entitled ‘Evolution’.
The title of the present volume is ‘From Big Bang to Nanorobots’. In this way we demonstrate
that all phases of evolution and Big History are covered in the articles of the present
Yearbook. Several articles also present the forecasts about future development.
The main objective of our Yearbook as well as of the previous issues is the creation
of a unified interdisciplinary field of research in which the scientists specializing in different
disciplines could work within the framework of unified or similar paradigms, using the
common terminology and searching for common rules, tendencies and regularities. At the
same time for the formation of such an integrated field one should use all available opportunities:
theories, laws and methods. In the present volume, a number of such approaches
are used
Evolution: From Big Bang to Nanorobots
The present volume is the fourth issue of the Yearbook series entitled ‘Evolution’.
The title of the present volume is ‘From Big Bang to Nanorobots’. In this way we demonstrate
that all phases of evolution and Big History are covered in the articles of the present
Yearbook. Several articles also present the forecasts about future development.
The main objective of our Yearbook as well as of the previous issues is the creation
of a unified interdisciplinary field of research in which the scientists specializing in different
disciplines could work within the framework of unified or similar paradigms, using the
common terminology and searching for common rules, tendencies and regularities. At the
same time for the formation of such an integrated field one should use all available opportunities:
theories, laws and methods. In the present volume, a number of such approaches
are used