Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Digital Love


Back again...

Some new web-based stuff that's been floating around has caught my attention.

Particularly THIS**. (note - google chrome or other webGL-ready browser necessary)

After my first response, I realized that this sort of experiment is exactly the kind of realtime interactive art that Tale of Tales and That Game Company have been espousing.

Behind the genius of 3 Dreams of Black is a development process made completely transparent - the artists have fully documented how they realized the piece, the code is open source and can be visualized in real-time, and they've included a few toys and tools to experiment with WebGL and graphical manipulation. Awesome.

So we find ourselves one step closer to the"interactive poetry" That Game Company has propagandized, as well as the "punk economy" (re: Open Source) in Tale of Tale's manifesto. What's next?

For starters, Bjork's new album is being released incrementally, with an iphone or ipad app to accompany each song. While I dislike the (possibly inadvertent) marketing ploy for Apple products, the interactive apps look really cool. Plus, Crystalline is a killer track!

WebGL is exactly the kind of thing that the Graffiti Research Lab should snatch up. These guys have been behind some really interesting experiments in street-art-oriented technology, such as the eyewriter (which has a heartbreaking but inspiring origin story) and graffiti markup language - a file format used to store graffiti motion and position data.

Part of the power of WebGL lies in the potential for high-end graphics to be processed in the cloud, meaning that your meager little netbook may be able to deliver super high-res visuals. I myself am a little wary of the cloud - too much personal data floating around, what with the recent Sony hack...

But you can't hold back the future. And since we're one step away from iBrain implants, we might as well make something cool with it.

**(Thanks to Emily Rifkin for sending me the link to 3 Dreams of Black!)

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