A toilet belonging to Beatles legend John Lennon sold at auction in Liverpool on Saturday for 9,500 pounds ($16,400) – nearly 10 times its guide price, organisers said.

How may we best position art in the dynamic forces of creative genius and social construct?

Lennon used the porcelain lavatory, which is painted with blue flowers and a blue border at the rim and at the base, when he lived at Tittenhurst Park in Berkshire, south-east England, from 1969 to 1972.

To organise the artist’s catalog retrospectively by period – for example a blue period, could be seen as imposing the latter as a principle of the former. This politic places the many over the one and yet the one must sit at the origin of the work.

The loo was removed when the house was being refurbished, and Lennon suggested the builder, John Hancock, take it home and “put some flowers in it”. Instead, the builder carefully stored it in a garden shed, where it remained for 40 years until he died, and his son-in-law put it up for sale.

Is the curator an adjunct to the creative birth? No, rather an alchemist that finds gold in the bottom of the vessel.

At the auction at the 33rd annual Beatles Convention in Liverpool, the toilet was expected to fetch about 1,000 pounds. “It is unbelievable,” said auction organiser Stephen Bailey after it sold for almost 10 times that.

We risk the intangible qualities of art when we provide a metric of quality: price, longevity, scale – this numbering is antithetical to the moment of creation – the shaping of the forms that can only later be proffered up to be blessed by the curator

“We had bids coming in from all over the place but it went to a private overseas buyer.”

Art is truly the international language.

All the standard image formats die – JPEG, BMP, PSD – forget it. Photoshop starts to use ‘Large Document Format’ or PSB – not understood by other tools. After Effects and Nuke just cry and give up. Most smaller software turns into radioactive dust. TIFF will hold the fort so long as the file is less than 4Gb in size. Yet another reason to congratulate SONY – their Vegas software will load a TIFF that size and even animate it – impressive! But in this case we couldn’t use Vegas because we need a certain motion path.

I generated the mosaic first at quarter size – ‘only’ 22.5K across. After Effects can handle up to 30K. Then I generate the full size image and pass it to command line software called ImageMagick which opens the file line by line and so can deal with the enormous memory strain. This is familiar from the days when Amiga computers would use similar buffering to work on print images in 4Mb of RAM (Art Department Pro was the name I seem to recall).

This can slice the image into 9 tiles of which we only need the middle. The trick is to track out from this middle section until it’s about to leave gaps at the edge of the screen. Then switch over to the lower resolution version which is by this stage indistinguishable.

Slightly tedious work-flow but doable. Has to be done 12 times, so it had better be.

Possible alternative route is to load a TIFF into Photoshop and then write an action to slice the image into percentages. By the time I got through reading the ImageMagick manual I felt that I’d paid my dues and I’ll stick to that script.

It’s interesting to think of how larger images might get with the demand for higher resolution, multiple screens and 3D. The Science Fiction staple ‘holodeck’ would probably require images of this kind. Although probably something made out of vectors, given current work.

THE END of THE BLU RAY IS NIGH

The Blu Ray of ShowbagHD is definitely ready to be sent out for people to try – the plan is to buy in bulk at about 5 dollars a disc and then charge about $12 (the same as a CD) which should cover the roughly $6 postage. I don’t expect to make any profit on this – I’d rather lots of people have it and there’s also a fair bit of sampled visuals on there which seem a bit bad to charge for.

I’ve learned enough from this to start on the album that was once going to be called Co Kla Coma 96 – at least until Kevin Elliot decided to send a cease and desist letter over the CKC name. All of that seems to be worked out now and for the moment it’s going to be a Blu Ray called EXCALIBUR (and no I don’t know why – it’s something from Scientology that Lou Ball came up with. Although it also has to do with Mr Ed, the talking horse which Lou reckons is a ‘psychic point of resonance’. These people have mental problems.)

The ancient Greeks had concepts that still work here. There is a real thing, and then there is the mimema, the thing that represents that real thing. The comparison is given of pressing a seal into hot wax, the wax holds the shape of the seal but none of the matter. The process is called mimesis, from which we have mimetic, mimic and mime. The pressure makes a copy which is a form, of no use unless it calls up a logical association in the recipient. The encoding only works because the sender and the receiver share the same decoding pad. So for example, I paint a picture of a house, you see this and the concept of a house is recalled. If you had only seen igloos, the communication breaks down. At this level the process seems convenient – but no particular art is involved, any picture of a house will do. So why go beyond pictograms?

A comparison with dreams can be made. Natural things can be aisthetic, that is provide material for the senses (in comparison to logic for the intellect). But mimemata are made, they require techne, which is a word that means both art and skill and of course provides technology. Mimemata are dreams that are made by people who are skilled.

This concept fits into Plato’s universal view. The artwork is simply a reminder of a thing that is itself an imperfect copy of the ideal – he talks of an ideal bed, the bed made by a carpenter and a painting of a bed, and sees each as less useful in turn. However, we can try represent the ideal directly – I can paint an image of a dog that is not a reproduction of an existing dog, I can perhaps create a work that portrays the ideal of ‘a dog’.

The Neo-Platonists put it like this: The One (the perfect origin of everything) creates a product which is necessarily inferior. This aspires to be rejoined with The One and so difference is created (less perfect things are multiple). This Ideal produces its own product that is again inferior, The Soul. Art is useful and good in that it seeks to transcend the imperfections of matter. The idea in the artist’s mind is always superior to the form of the work, and making art is an expression of the desire to be elevated above the material world.

In the Christian ages The One became God and the artist sought to elevate themselves by revealing the order and discipline that underlays all of His creation. You can see why a fight broke out over Icons – to the west they were mnemonics of the hidden structure of reality, to the east they were insults to something that describes but cannot be described. Both are true if you think this way. I don’t really want to, but it might help to try it for a moment.

So let’s. Rather than use ‘transcription’, which is an unskilled mechanical process, the character of the artwork could be described as a mimema of personality. I’m then able to build upon the discussion that has surrounded aisthesis for several thousand years – whether that’s a good thing I don’t yet know. Instinctually I think it will be helpful in building a concept that’s sufficient for the work at hand…

Sketch it out: there exists shared data which exists ‘above’ the artist and the viewer. For Plato this is an ideal world in which the default templates of everything is stored, perhaps for me it’s the complexes of the mental apparatus  in both persons. The data is not stored in the object, it is referenced by the object. So (big jump here) is the quality of the artwork no more important than the font in which a library call number is written? No… The ‘font’ is part of the means by which we retrieve the data – an artwork is more ‘beautiful’ when more accurate to the shared mental complex.

Very wobbly … but I think I can move Personality out of the object, place it in a ’shared space’ between the people (a culture?) – idealise it with my chosen metric – and describe Character as a kind of index, the accuracy of which can be tested by how well it retrieves the personality metric – while at the same time relating this to terminology of aesthetics so far as I understand them.

That’ll do for today!

Can an artwork have (a) personality? Such a simple question offers such terrible hidden dangers.

There are at least three. Firstly, the definition of ‘artwork’ is very difficult, based upon the definition of art, perhaps fine art. Slightly less problematic is ‘personality’. Attached to that is a third danger; the distinction ‘have personality’ as against ‘have a personality’.

It is fair to warn that some of this has never been satisfactorily solved, and is unlikely to be solved here, above operational definitions. Let’s start as simply as possible and introduce complexity when it cannot be avoided.

The literal answer is no, artwork cannot have a personality. For the Oxford English Dictionary defines personality as the ‘quality, character, or fact of being a person as distinct from a thing’. Whatever an artwork is, it is a thing. The history of the term makes it clear that a person is a conscious, thinking being.

However ‘have personality’ is different to ‘have a personality’. A thing cannot have a personality – there is no faculty for it. But it could be that when we define artwork we can see a place where the personality of the maker or viewer could be stored and recalled. It’s a similar point to this: where is the music on a CD? Until the bits are converted into sound via a laser and heard there is only the potential to reproduce music. The artist encodes music as bits. The listener plays the record, hears music. In between we have an artwork. My argument will be that this is true of all artworks and I will need to make the case that all are transcriptions of some kind.

We first need to examine figurative meaning. When I describe a storm as angry or a garden as charming, my listener should know that I do not literally mean the clouds are filled with a human emotion, or that the garden is attempting be alluring. Figurative language is effective shorthand for one person to communicate an idea to another, based upon our common ability to personalize things and ascribe motivations to objects. The idea is not shared systematically but rather as an impression that could be measured differently by each person.

Yet figurative language is used very often and evidently works quite well. Particularly in describing artworks; it is acceptable to talk of a ‘sad film with a happy ending’ without having to systematically go through the script, the acting, cinematography and so on, linking each to the person involved. You may even read that a film ‘could not make up its mind’ or ‘lacked identity’ and not assume that the celluloid was sentient.

Studies by Piaget have found that children in a ‘pre-operational stage’ will ascribe personality to objects up the age where they can be taught otherwise. Even then there remains a temptation to blame something for being in the wrong place or maliciously rolling under furniture. Socks are particularly good at this.

In some cultures the personality of objects has been maintained as natural spirits that animate all things. For example astrology personifies the stars and planets, which are supposed to influence human behavior. We still describe people as ‘jovial’ or ‘mercurial’ and say that mental illness is ‘lunacy’. Many faiths involve a Creator whose handiwork is evidenced in the universe. In this case there is personality expressed in all things as a coherent whole. (The transcription is problematic – bad things are evidence of ‘mysterious ways’).

The attack on animism in western philosophy begins with Thales deterministically predicting an eclipse in 585BC. Even so he found the best explanation for magnetism was that it was directed by a soul. While over time the scientific view has gained the upper hand the mysteries of quantum physics have had a similar effect on Deepak Chopra, Fritjof Capra et al.

Figurative meaning is at the heart of all art, which communicates efficiently via impressions and shared psychology. This is a crux of my argument, that psychology is necessary to understanding the presentation of artworks.

There are many conflicting opinions on the definition of art. Fortunately we don’t have to determine a definition for all art, only that an artwork is something capable of holding the personality of the artist and interacting with that of the viewer.

Rather redundantly, OED defines art as, “Skill; its display and application.” The Cambridge does better with, “the making of objects, images, music, etc. that are beautiful or that express feelings”, although surely they allow both. The phrase ‘express feelings’ is the point that needs to be expanded. Both definitions are limited in that they only deal with the act of creation without mentioning the need for perception. Most sophisticated theories of art require some transaction between artist and audience.

Marcel Duchamp sums it up nicely;

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives a final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.

http://www.iaaa.nl/cursusAA&AI/duchamp.html

Duchamp is quite certain that the creator is a medium and does not possess the meaning that the work will take on once seen. The meaning comes from ‘the labyrinth beyond time and space’, which I would more humbly interpret as the depths of personal psychology.

Wollheim examines numerous definitions of art and finds fault with most. He holds two criteria as sufficient when no artistic tradition exists; ‘natural expression’ by the artist, ‘a secretion of an inner state’ met by ‘correspondence’ in the viewer, how it ‘seems to reiterate something in us’ (p47). Where there is a tradition, when we act according to that context we are creating art.

Richard Wollheim, Art and its objects, p.1, 2nd edn, 1980, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521297060

For my purposes the ‘inner state’ and ‘something in us’ he describes I would take as psychological formations or complexes. From what I understand of Wollheim as a pshychoanalytical writer I don’t think he would have disagreed. When we act in the context of existing work I would describe that as part of the transcription process, the use of symbols shared in a culture is involved in the encoding.

I think Duchamp is more succinct. “… the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius: he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Artist History.”

At a simple level the artwork must hold personality because it is formed by someone, and seen by another. Whether the artwork is made or identified or appropriated a mind has been involved in forming it. Attempts to remove personality from the work, for example John Cage’s use of chance, only leads to that being made part of the work. And until the work is communicated it is like the bits of a CD – potential.

What form does the transcribed personality take in artwork? That brings the concept of a personality codec, and that’s a whole new essay.

Some of the above is ’scientific’. Some is not.

When you are surprised by the pseudo-science that many people believe, take another look at the science that is also believed. Certainly we have evidence for Dark Matter and the Big Bang – we also have some evidence of the Yeti, UFOs and ghosts. My personal bias is to have more faith in string theory than homotherapy. But you have to keep challenging your bias and ask if it really is more foolish to believe in memory effect than to believe that strings exist because the maths is ‘elegant’ (in 26 dimensions no less). If tachyons, why not poltergeists? Both seem rather elusive.

If string theory was a complete joke, I’d have no way of knowing. I can’t read the maths and I can’t do the experiments. All I have is faith, the same faith that a parishioner has in a pastor – that a man of the cloth (or white lab coat) would not tell them such lies. My faith in the Big Bang is still faith, and uncritical faith. I accept that experiments have found evidence of a big bang, but I think if I was told that the evidence suggested the ’steady state’ universe that Einstein once proposed, I’d probably follow that just as blindly.

It is true that most pseudo-science is based on very bad research (particularly in alternative therapies). Nevertheless, there is some good research in there, and some very dicey reasons for what is accepted as fact. The demarcation is not utterly clear.

Feynman said “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” The people that made What the Bleep do We Know started properly by conveying how little we understand, they screwed it by claiming to understand it as a spiritual matter. I don’t want to fall into that trap. I don’t understand ’spooky action at a distance’ under any model and if Einstein was similarly flummoxed I’m in good company. For me phrases such ‘a wave function collapses to form a particle’ have the same ring as ‘energy flows through your chi points’ – psychobabble.

Particularly galling is the ‘many worlds’ interpretation. Stephen Hawking might support it, but to me it sounds like Sir Conan Doyle and his fairy photographs. You can crap on about ‘quantum decoherence’ all you like – there is no bloody evidence of a multiverse, not the tiniest shred, and David Deutsch et al are selling the oil of snakes.

So what of this? For the science community to lament the stupidity of the common folk is to not understand how ridiculous much mainstream science can seem. Put your own house in order first. For me it means that when somebody critiques a system of thought as ‘unscientific’ I am not overawed. In studying Freud as a basis of my postgraduate work I’ve found it offends people as ‘unscientific’. Perhaps so, but the Id and Dark Matter have more in common than they might suppose.

Secondly – Sensible Blog is now running.

Here’s something not sensible enough:

I like television. That is, I never watch television and I don’t like TV shows or the ads or TV culture. I like television, the thing itself. That‘s hard to explain. My poor students are often subjected to my enthusiasm which seems entirely impractical for assignments and their later fame.

The only things I really like watching (apart from videos of mechanical televisions etc.) are idents and test cards, and I’m obviously not the only one. I love motion graphics, how things are designed to occupy space, colour and time. I like abstract video synthesis more than watching people.

But really I like television because it is the machine of my childhood. There are men (usually men) that are thrilled by steam locomotives, by short wave radio, by phone exchanges, tin toys, calculators … whatever mechanical fetish you can think of there will be men (usually men) that collect, debate, and play around with it in a nonsensical useless way. The epitome of this is Hi Fi, which has nothing to do with the enjoyment of recorded music and everything to do with the perfect tone arm lowered onto a pristine half speed mastered slab of vinyl. But also model rail-roads circling around a tiny landscape, shelves of unwatched DVDs arranged alphabetically and arcade machines lined up geometrically in the basement. The activity is always kept away from usefulness, and woeful is the man that gets a job in the thing he loved when it wasn’t a job.

It has to be play, or it doesn’t count.

Now one standard answer to this is ‘sublimation’. That is – man has lusts that are not acceptable to society; he therefore sidetracks the desire into symbolic pursuits, which explains the odd intensity of the activity and its overt uselessness. (Although some men do make good use of their libido in becoming CEO of something or other and dying of heart attack aged 50.) The man who is a dedicated Dwarf level 90 in some online world is no danger to society, unless you forcibly un-dwarf him, suddenly unleashing the hidden lusts kept at bay. ‘Online Addiction’ is a complex business.

(I have gone though some analysis and can pinpoint exactly where and how my own process of sublimation has taken place. I’m quite satisfied that it has validity – but you’ll have to excuse my not providing you with the personal evidence.)

That’s all very well as a recent phenomena, but what did men do before model rail roads? What sublimative technology was available to the first humans? Here is Gronk, carving his stone tip for his spear; does he have time to argue with Klonk about chipping from the bottom up? No, these stone tips were a serious business, life or death, something you would be buried with to survive the afterlife. I guess that lusts were pretty much acted on straight away until people started to settle together in groups and get the food supply stabilised with repositories and so on. A stable food supply meant there was time to wonder how the universe worked – and how to get along with the neighbours. Which gave us magic and religion.

Magic of course is the key we’ve been looking for. Magic isn’t just about why it rains. Magic is about how you can make it rain or not rain. By rituals you humbly request that nature bend this way or that, if it doesn’t work you didn’t do the ritual right. Magical rituals are interestingly similar to some of the activities of Hi Fi enthusiasts, following an internal logic, with strange repetitive processes that must be followed to avoid failure, odd components that are rare and expensive and so on. The magician believes that there is a perfect knowledge that will bring power over the world. The average enthusiast feels happiest when the steam engine has hit that perfect note, or in my case when designing a high definition playback system. Something however small is under control.

If you can cast spells, that’s fundamentally more interesting than the tedious tasks for which your spells will be used – finding lost animals, some gold coins, smite some enemies etc. The magician is intoxicated by the thing itself. I’m like that with television.

When you go out to a club or a show, you will see there are some people that immediately focus on any available video screen. Or there will be people at a VJ performance that spend the night watching the person operating the mixer and ignoring the screen. I am the former, a type ‘V’. The latter we’ll call type ‘H’, and allow that there are some in-between. These groups are really quite obvious when you run a band that uses video for umpteen years. When you teach video production you will see the students group themselves so that the V’s get the cameras and the H’s are scripting or researching. God help all H teams.

Type ‘V’ watches life through a viewfinder, where it is under control. Even better is to create a world on screen where every colour and form is directly selected. Video production and especially motion graphics satisfies a psychological need for order, it scratches an itch that’s been there since birth (if you believe in nature) or near birth (if you believe in nurture). It probably relates to toilet training.

There’s a PhD topic : Video Synthesis and Toilet Training.

I suspect certain aspects of synthetic video are somehow connected with symptoms of autism – the spinning and blinking and repetition. I can’t claim a causal relationship, and of course some aspects of synthetic video are simply limitations of the machinery – limited sample space, the low contrast of video, colour space etc. It’s just a hunch that type V is based on a complex (which is a very loose term for a structure in the brain).

The psychology of video synthesis is looming as a major issue in my research, a dangerous deviation or the key to the whole thing. I think to understand synthesis (and actually the whole European electronic music tradition) you need to read Freud, Jung, Adler et al. But for now I will keep this in the silly blog away from supervisors with rolled up newspapers. Safer here.

um.

There sure were a lot of crazy women this week. I mean like a balloon full of unicycles crazy. Like “oh jeezuz christ please don’t let that one be coming for me” … It will be seriously nice to go back into hiding where people don’t oscillate between insane hate and adoration every 50Hz. Crazy women are an alternative energy source.

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And the Shitmagician lives. Tales from the Crypt. The Curse of the Mummy. You either know or you don’t want to know about the Shitmagician. But HE LIVES.

um.

Anyway that was a good birthday. Maybe a thousand people? Probably about 900. I am tired now like that aeroplane tired when you hit the airport after a 24 hour flight. Rowboat wobble tired.

um.

http://tired.com/

Regretfully I must now commence a four year stint in the research army. Called up, given a rifle, sent off to battle the foe. The letter came a few weeks ago and it grimly sets out the conditions under which research will take place:

• You must spend 35 hours a week researching. Inspectors may call at any time and ask, ‘are you researching?’. Must be able to answer ‘Oh God yes YES!’
• That doesn’t mean you can slack off from your full time job mind you. 70 hours a week ought to do it. That’s less than working at Apple.
• Or achieve insufficient Artistic Metrics. Three paintings a week.
• You will cease and desist from saying rude things about BRUTALIST U’s new fun house. BRUTALIST is your true mother and loves you.
• No biscuits.
• You will respect and adore the Holy Writ of Saints Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida and anyone else Social Science may elect as prophet.
• Sharpen your pencils. Get a hair cut. Stand up straight.

Really it comes down to this – there are not going to be enough hours in the week to write the usual trash here. I will need to write on the Sensible Work Blog now, because I don’t want to mix up what I write for study with the claptrap that exists here. Either I delete the claptrap, which seems unfair, or write elsewhere.

So it’s all a bit sad.

I don’t know if I will be able to maintain the load and may at some point have to go part time in some way. We’ll see. If so, I might be able to channel my inner astronaut a few more times. Otherwise this blog will have to be a rare thing, with bottled bile. It will not go away.

Goodnight, and Good Luck.

I can understand that they need some kind of proof (“photograph of audience disapproval – must portray at least one chair being thrown”) but as I write down the things I have done (“at least four used earplugs from performances in the year preceding the application”) they become grey and lifeless. Pin the butterfly to the card.

Vincent won’t talk to me. The Junior Science League have fallen silent. That is, the automatic writing that usually writes those updates is disapproving of this sensible. The only joke I could think of this week was a crossword for Twitter –
1 Across: What are you doing right now? (140)

It seemed good at about 3am.

Rather than whining it seems better to focus the mind on the important things, meaning the random noise from which reality extrudes. Hearing that youtube now receives 20 hours of uploaded video every minute was a starting point that led to a video of the owl on the US dollar.

There is a small owl just to the left of the “1″ which appears on the upper right hand corner of the Dollar Bill.  From time to time politicians like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush Jr. have been caught with a camera flashing the horned owl symbol with their hands.

So says http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/greatseal/index.htm which doesn’t seem forbidden knowledge to me as it’s on the Internut but quibble not – these presidents are flipping THE BIRD and not just any bird. As many people have noted the owl looks equally like a spider. Or Marty Feldman.

If you fold the owl you get Chris Marshall’s Organ Warehouse.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

If you fold Chris Marshall you get The Photoshop Cat

If you fold the cat you get this. No I don’t know either.

If you fold that MAD MAGAZINE STYLE and hold it upside down you get 4096 sequenced facial expressions. Which was twelve years ago! Some people I know are younger than that man’s face!

When he folds his face for the 4095th time you get John Foxxes holiday snaps!

When you notice something odd about picture 25 and fold that you get

which you really don’t want to look at so you quickly fold it to get

phew!

The problem revealed by The Spirits Within and The Polar Express; that synthetic actors look like freshly dug corpses dragged about on invisible meat hooks – this is not going to hold Hollywood back for too many more years.

Please view this pictorial comparison. One of these is DAZ3D’s latest ‘unimesh’, Victoria 4.2. The other is a bag full of Botox called Nichole Kidman.

In case you’re not sure, the one on the left is the download. Neither of these ladies can act, but the download is free, can be any age, skin colour, body weight or whatever you need. Instantly. Doesn’t date junkies, whine for millions or run to the tabloids. Clothing is about 12 bucks a dress.

Being a unimesh she can also be male if required.

Now we’ve been promised this future almost as many times as flying cars, but it has tenacity, great tenacity, getting more urgent as Hollywood struggles to find a foothold. They are in the same boat as recording artists and that boat is The Titanic. They are going to build a bridge over Uncanny Valley and it will be a 8 lane highway. Yes, they had to retreat back to toys and ants and jungle animals, but it was a strategic retreat and the counter attack is not far off.

This is the problem: recording is no longer tenable. Performance is safe, plot, cinematography, soundtrack – all of that is still needed, but the idea that you have only one recording of an artistic performance is not long for this world. Musicians can’t sell albums, Hollywood can’t sell films – we have lost respect for them because we think (perhaps foolishly) we can do them ourselves and we want to at very least ‘mash up’ our own take on our entertainment.

The recording is only as old as the phonograph and the cinematographe. They are technologies that have had a good run, but like the panorama and the zoopraxiscope they can’t last for ever. And this is not simple ‘modernist’ progress but a cycle backwards to find a fresh way forward.

We will have a format where there’s potential for different outcomes, paths, unexpected twists. Sometimes you have one leading lady, next time it could be two men. Set the action in Rome or on Mars it doesn’t matter to the arc of the story. Who would you trust to hold this together? Who could be the one to ride this cacophony? Not the film director with their ‘auteur vision’ and their careful tip toeing over the bad angles. No, you need a Theatre Director. Someone that can fly seat of their pants night after night without the trick of edits and takes. The new media (hooray it’s back!) will be a study of Brecht, not Eisenstein.

This is how it will be. The stage is where the entertainment will be delivered, given the current trade shows, most likely a 3D screen of some sort. On your console will be found the synthespians Victoria 7 and Michael 8 or whatever the model is that year. We have props, clothing, scenery and so on. We buy the latest romance written by our Theatre team – not a time line but via motivations, obstacles, Jungian archetypes, all the ingredients. Our artist has devised a situation and it’s open to us to place it on Mars or Rome as we wish.

Michael loves Vikki. Vikki wants to be an explorer – ‘wait for me’. But Stephanie is in the wings with designs on Michael. We’d prefer that Stephanie was Stephen – no problem, the faces and gestures are simply called up from a bank. The end is very sad. We tweak the motivations so that Vikki finds true love, and one of the viewers saves that version as her favourite. Everybody gets a boon – directors still direct, costumers design clothing that will be scanned and sold, musicians learn to use event driven composition tools. Even the actors will find fame as the greatest face or body movement to sweep over the consoles. Every viewer can play with the variables and hope one day to be a published creator. Jobs and dreams are restored.

The underlying technologies are already in place, but we lack a sufficient interface to direct them. For example MPEG-7 is an existing scheme for describing media such that it can be resynthesised, but it is so cryptic that it’s had very minor traction in the arts – especially compared to MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 which we all know as ‘.mp3′. That thing that killed the music industry.

My future research would seem to be building an interface so that a director (or conductor) can use MPEG-7 to create with existing video and sound assets. For example direct a stored video rainstorm to clear up over a time set by a live performance. The interface is the missing element. To make a comparison – you could write directly in Portable Document Format – but it’s easier and more artistic to use Indesign.

The transition between real and virtual becomes easier. At my workplace they have a print shop, you can get your posters and books made there. They now have a 3D scanner, which can copy a small object, about the size of a figurine. And a 3D printer, which can make a real plastic copy of your 3D art. We hope to soon have a suit that records body motions, at which time we can have directors choreograph action for storage. Now that an art college can afford these things – a personal device is not too far off.

I’ve cheated by calling this a game, it’s not, but using motivations and problems to direct the action is closer to game design and I firmly believe that the future ‘film director’ must study both stage plays and computer games to be aligned with future trends in entertainment. Musicians must learn on FMOD as much as Cubase. Video should be seen projected on walls and 3D designers aligned with set builders. In effect we arrive exactly back at the same point as the last scribble – why disdain the game? Media Art is not going to follow the same worn tracks of the last half century.

It is going to melt, and that melt is going to be called Music.