Starting to put the next project together.
A JOURNEY INTO THE VIRTUAL WORLD #13
Welcome back to A Journey into the Virtual World. In the previous post we take a look at the beginnings of a new semester, and the rummaging about in my head for a new idea - which starts with looking at the work of other artists. If you missed that one, be sure to take a look.
As part of my continued exploration into the relation between the digital world and the physical, I wanted to experiment with the moving image. My idea was to use the idea of the post-digital to extract a meaningful piece of cinematic work derived from a virtual setting. The creation of work from another reality (in this case virtual) also reflected the story of Orpheus in which he enters the underworld (another realm) to retrieve his love. Having discovered Warhol’s anti-film work, I wanted to use his ideas as a basis for my project, creating a scene that was by and large still, save for some minor elements.
ther point of inspiration was that of George Stibbs’ piece Whistlejacket (1762), and Jeff Walls’ piece A Donkey in Blackpool (1999). It wasn’t the content of these artist’s work, but the juxtaposition between them. The first is a classic painting of a Marquess of Rockingham's racehorse. It is classic in style and portrays the beauty and majesty of the animal. The second is the modern retelling, showing a donkey in a far less glorified state. This modernisation is something that I wanted to implement into my work, creating a piece that interprets aspects of the myth, and in turn is able to be interpreted by the viewer themselves, through the vagaries in its creation.
Another aspect I focused on after having watched the French film Orphée (1950). I was intrigued by the concept explored within the picture that explore the possibility of travelling between worlds or realities via mirrors.
Heurtebise: I'll give you the secret of secrets. Mirrors are the doors through which Death comes and goes. Look at yourself in a mirror all your life... and you'll see death at work like bees in a hive of glass.
Orphée: How do you know these frightening things?
Heurtebise: Don't be naïve. Could I be her chauffeur without learning certain frightening things?
Orphée: Heurtebise, there's nothing more to be done.
Heurtebise: Yes, there is. Find her again.
Orphée: No man can do that unless he kills himself.
Heurtebise: A poet is more than a man.
While the words might not be wholly pertinent to the project I was hoping to create, the concepts that surround the mirror as an object for reflection and transportation stuck with me. This led me to the Narcissus myth, in which the hunter from Thespiae in Boeotia, who was known for his beauty, gets absorbed in his own reflections, having seen himself in a pool of water. He falls in love with the reflected image, and, unable to pull himself away, he lost his will to live, and eventually died. The creation of an alluring image, or one that draws the viewer in intrigued me greatly, and in my mind went hand in hand with the kind of anti-film project I was hoping to create, and the idea of a false image stuck with me as I began to consider the virtual world as a reflection of our own, and, as I had explored in previous projects, it is one that is sometimes difficult to distinguish from reality, a problem similar to that which faced Narcissus (as re-enacted in Orphée in the above image).
The conceptual base for the project was inseparably linked to my previous work – Memories of a Digital World, and A Phoney War. Rather than with the latter, in which I concentrated on the action occurring within the virtual war, I wanted to concentrate on the mundanity of it, the waiting that occurs before the action of war. David Cotterrell speaks of the boredom and fear of war in his speech on his experienced in Afghanistan as a war artist. There were several quotes that inspired me from his speech, however it was the following that resonated with me the most and seemed most applicable to what I was hoping to create.
My grandfather had said that war was ‘90% boredom and 10% fear’ and what I hadn’t realise that the boredom is renascent, it’s hugely important. Those long periods of inactivity and ambiguity are the things that are actually the most traumatic. It’s the not understanding it’s the bleakness. – David Cotterrell
My initial approach was to record test footage using an appropriate platform. I decided to use a military simulation game called Arma 2. Within the game there is functionality for the user to edit the virtual environments as well as the object and people that inhabit it with the game’s 3D editor. As well as this, it allows for environmental control, such as weather effect and lighting, be it man made or natural. Despite the advantaged of this program, it lacked the technological advancements that I desired to implement into the project in order to portray a fully realistic image. In previous project, I had managed to circumnavigate this by methods of obfuscation, and a small final outcome. An example can be seen below as the bushes in the desert are repeated in a clearly identifiable pattern. Another aspect of this program that didn’t lend itself well to the project, specifically the use of video, that I was hoping to record, was the implementation of the game engines environmental effect, such as the layering of particles, brought up by the wind generated from the helicopter rotor blades.
After coming to a standstill with the Arma 2 engine, I decided to make the move to the newer release, Arma 3, which released five years after the previous entry, coming out in 2013. This leap forward yielded far better visuals, and the environmental controls in the newer Eden 3D Editor program were far more comprehensive, allowing for a more realistic portal into the virtual world.
That’ll do for this entry, in the next one I’ll be looking at some more inspiration I found during the course of the project, as well as further experimentation with the Arma 3 engine, and development of the project in general, finding out myself what it was I was actually trying to create.
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