City of the Mind
This is my Christmas present to you and my news of now. If you ask how it is for me, I can only answer with this. It is my pome for a new Vancouver of the mind. Soon I shall be o’ercome with Olympic music and stupefying acts of heroism in Vancouver. This is my respite already from the madness. My Vancouver of the mind. Your Vancouver of your mind. Your Vancouver of Google. Let us share hallucinations. Happy new year and wishes of many upcoming real realizations to you.
CITY OF THE MIND
dbCinema is a langu(im)age processor and graphic synthesizer. Install Shockwave first from http://vispo.com/sw if you haven’t already. Mac users need to use Firefox.
VANCOUVER
http://tinyurl.com/yae64lz
In dbCinema, synthesis is an act of the mind working at the suggestion of an unusual form of collage. Language to image to multi perspectival cinema. A visual word processor/dictionary exploring the meaning of “Vancouver” via Google image search and cross-breeding with generative art. Slideshow run amok to slidvid, dbCinemation. The mind, of its own accord, creates a new Vancouver made of current Vancouver. In this graphic synthesizer, you are the synthesizer. For synthesis is an act of the mind, not simply the technology. dbCinema collages. The mind synthesizes.
In ‘Vancouver’, dbCinema collages with dynamic opacity in a star-shaped ‘brush’ moving randomly around the screen. The pictures seem to blend together to make new scenes that don’t exist, and those new scenes are what is created in the act of the mind. It is not so much a futuristic Vancouver as a multi-perspectival interpenetration of things we’ve seen about and of Vancouver.
It is for people who enjoy synthetic acts of the mind and tricks of the eye. Tricks of the eye are mostly tricks of the mind. dbCinema has no real tricks to it. It just mindlessly collages in ways that present images to us that readily trigger multi-perspectival synthesis in the mind. That synthesis is the real trip of this piece. It’s DIY, in that sense. Imagination and synthesis required. Create this city as you will in your own mind.
It’s sometimes remarked that computer art too often feels enclosing, truncated in its possibilities and in its artistic range and quality. I think the main thing is to trigger imagination and synthesis, thought, reflection, creativity, joy, wonder, analysis, perceptual perspicuity on multiple perspectives, langu(im)agical textations, dbCinemations, and hallucinatory realizations.
Click the canvas when you want it to do something else. But give it at least a couple of minutes first (or longer) just as-is without clicking.
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1 Response to “City of the Mind”.
Cool work, Jim. Thanks!
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