----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Hi - I feel my week or so is up, of course, but I do want to give one example of an early interactive work of mine; I was trying to think back to early virtual space investigations. In 1970-71, I created a piece, 4320, using a computer program written by Charles Strauss at Brown University, and run on a vector graphics console with keyboard and joystick controls. The program presented a four-dimensional hypercube on a screen, and the hypercube (or technically it's two-dimensional projection) could be manipulated by the joystick. I was this as a virtual space, an else-where space, but one that a human operator could 'drive' in. I asked a number of students to sit at the console, as if they were driving in 4d (spatial coordinates), and to complete the task of turning the 4d shape into a 3d shape (by making it orthogonal to the projected 3d space); to then turn the 3d shape (a cube) orthogonally to the screen, creating a square, and finally, to reduce the square to a dot - hence the title 4320 as the dimensions were reduced. The participants interacted with the hypercube and felt indeed that they were driving in 4d, that they were inhabiting it in a way. I wrote about this and other work and human experience in general in terms of what I called immersive and definable hierarchies; the idea of the former is what is called flow now; and the latter, the mechanics behind the habitus of the flow - the programming, visualization protocols and display, etc. etc. I worked off Merleau-Ponty, Schutz, and other phenomenologists, as well as Piaget's mathematico-logic work, and some ideas from the structuralists and post-structuralists. I found the same issues then, that we're discussing now. There's a brief description of the project at http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/2008/08/27/1971-alan-sondheims-4320/ I feel most of the research since then, that might be useful, is found in second-order cybernetics materials and cog psy. For me, the odd thing about 4320 is that the screen/virtuality setup is identical with the ones in use today in SL and other virtual worlds / mixed realities. You couldn't place your physical self/representation in the vector graphics display, but you did feel you were 'there.'
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