Ghost Hack

I’m privileged to have the opportunity to visit EyeO and hang out with the likes of Casey Reas and Robert Hodgin. It’s weird that our little “shiny” community has branched out and formed its own conference.

At the risk of rambling, I just want to quickly write that I haven’t blogged or tumblr’d or wordpressed or whatever for god knows how long. After having attended EyeO I felt that the best way to connect with these technocrats was to share the work that we all love, and also have a space through which I can write about the process on my own work, be it procedural art or game dev.

Marius Watz also gave a thought provoking talk, part of which I want to muse about. He was talking about this notion of over-used algorithms, eg vornoi, flocking, etc in our medium, and how it’s become a sort of cliche, a “found object” through which many artists simply snap screenshots and simply upload to flickr and call it a day. This reflected how myself and Aaron Koblin felt every time we’re tasked to make “yet another ” garbage flocking particle BS thing, and I feel like Marius summed up these thoughts quite well.

However… I also feel that 99.999% of the human population have no idea what a particle simulation is, or flocking, or iso-surfaces… as much work as it is that one puts into something highly complex, the layman, the non “technocrat” (as Marius puts it) will simply look at it and go “well.. that was cool”, and that would be the end of the dialogue. 

I was talking to an editor Jason (…forgot last name…) from Wired Magazine during my lunch break. He laughed at this and compared it to comedians that either make jokes for other comedians, or jokes that are for the audience at large. I found this a somewhat apt analogy.

Another thought was that, our medium simply does not have an audience sophisticated, or been around long enough, to make comparisons to identify what works are simple snapshots of “found objects” and what works are deeper and more fulfilling. To make yet another comparison, film and cinematography has been around for a hundred years and there has been enough time for audiences that want deeper, more interesting stories, or films, or cinematographic techniques. 

I asked my colleague George Michael Brower about this, and if I may paraphrase… “we are in danger of making ourselves more and more insular”, if we deny others to simply pick up and use “found objects”. He likens it to the chiptunes scene, where everyone in the audience also has their own chiptunes band.

to be continued…