My first job as a digital artist ( i discount my work in architecture and 3D architectural visualizations because architecture is not art unless it is the work of an exceptional artist like Zaha Hadid, even then it is too bound by gravity ) was making 3D Virtual Worlds design and art for a small company called VWorld Technologies. At the time I was also building in ActiveWorlds and naturally my first world was a Martian Environment. My boyfriend and I were hanging out in ActiveWorlds and bonding while building stuff and chatting. It was the best time. My boyfriend at the time was building a Moon Landing simulation at another lab using software called Motivate. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen.
On a very personal level I'd like to find out what makes me like using the computer that much and building in it. Is it because there's a certainty and clarity to a digital world? Is it the fact that you have a god-like ability to create anything?
The push for 3D virtual reality is the need to create a version of the world where we are in total control. I'm like of course - in the real world we have absolutely zero understanding of who we are, where we are, and what's going on.
The smartest people in the world are trying to figure out how exactly the brain operates and they take very small steps with little creatures like birds, studying and building data models and trying to wrap their heads around.. their heads. Can we realistically study a system that we are embedded in? That's why we need machines - the third eye.
Have you ever looked inside one of those things [computers]? It's a whole hierarchy of angels- all on slats. And those little tubes-those are miracles.
—- Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers
Now I am rather an authority on gods, so I identified the machine -- it seems to me to be an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy.
Fundamentally I believe we humans need to have control of our environment, it's a survival instinct. We have so little control in our lives because of entropy. With computers we have found a way to contain entropy at least within the context of the machine.
Our personal view of the universe is so fragmented we are in dire need of a world with little entropy where we could feel safe from the coldness of space.
But it is a cave alright, the same cave Plato talked about, with shadows dancing on the walls. He knew his stuff.
The reason I am writing this is because of all the talk about Metaverse and Facebook, I am sure data models have given Facebook a reason to fear obsolescence. I am thinking that Facebook could literally disappear in a month. Such is the fate of digital constructs and business models. A small, absurd, tiny, piece of paper with scribbles on it can last 500 years. This was my discovery while studying the old masters and art. There was a 5000 years old tiny animal sculpture I saw at the Morgan Library that blew me away. I have since learned to respect the fragility and endurance of small, deep works, made of durable materials that resist entropy.
I found that great ideas resist entropy the best, followed by the written word.