In 2003, as my first attempt at a major work of RT3D since Virtual Humanoids the previous year, I deliberately avoided anthropocentric considerations, whether in attempting to create a humanoid avatar or character within the environment, presenting cues within the work to reinforce anthropocentric scale, or any explicit causal relationship with the material world external to the built-in digital media interface devices such as mouse, keyboard and visual display. This made construction on the work - Memory Plains Returning – very fast. It meant I could concentrate equally on audio and visual space, creating small self-contained RT3D VRML worlds (the conventional name for individual instances of virtual environments). Each of these worlds was linked together spatially and therefore, because of the spatial navigation model of RT3D in this instance, temporally. Like movements in a piece of music or songs on an album, they were separate but linked together in an interdependent set of relationships determined formally. They were united by an underlying theme of memory, specifically the loss of memory accompanying immigration, though this was reflected more in the titles than by any didactic audiovisual sense; an invitation rather than prescription. These self-contained worlds existed together in a series showing difference and continuity, or difference and repetition, Deleuze’s term which DeLanda, who explains it in scientific terms of phase transitions and intensive/extensive qualities, explicitly relates to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the actualization of the virtual in space (DeLanda 70-74). It is potentially similar to Munster’s reading of Guattari’s actualisations of machines of virtuality, if understood as a kind of vector or site of actualization or process of a certain virtuality or tendency (Munster 113). Either way, since they are defining potential formal systems, it is feasible to apply these readings to (construction of, and interaction with) sound and vision, both as technical processes. Munster’s sleight of hand – perspective – as the formal system with which we visualise 3D space, Deleuze and Guattari call “only a historical manner of occupying diagonals or transversals”, a reterritorialisation of those lines of flight (Deleuze and Guattari 329). After freeing Kandinsky’s point and line from a dialectic relationship with each other in a McLuhanistic container, Deleuze and Guattari don’t take Kandinsky’s visionary (pun intended) step of the plane which necessarily implies 3D space (at least as represented by/on 2D planes and offers a whole new ‘plane’ of potential); rather, Deleuze and Guattari call perspective the end of a “multiplicity of shapes and the dynamism of lines”, suggesting that music may offer an example of how to “engage in a becoming” for painting (Deleuze and Guattari 329). Since RT3D space makes no formal distinction between sound and vision, it is similar to the “increasingly rich and consistent material” of Deleuze and Guattari, its increasing richness “the same as what holds heterogenies together without their ceasing to be heterogeneous” (Deleuze and Guattari 329). The music and sounds of Memory Plains Returning were composed and designed with this Deleuzian process in mind.
Figure 3: Memory Plains Returning: Memory Sheets by Adam Nash
Again similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s rich material, the ability to inline (i.e., contain other VRML files as interactive subsets) entire worlds (the conventional name for individual instances of virtual environments) into containing worlds arbitrarily is part of a modular approach encouraged by VRML itself, in a very literal (i.e., technological) enactment of McLuhan’s new media content cycle. In terms of it being the product of an experiment, Memory Plains Returning is a simple proof of the concept that inlines all of the individual worlds that make it up: Memory Boxes, Memory Forest, Memory Sheets, Memory Plains, Memory Epiphany, Memory Used, Memorised Regret. Each of these movements, as I called them at the time, were self-contained VRML worlds that may or may not also inline other VRML worlds themselves. The Memory part of the title was also a rephrasing of Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion that “the musician is in the best position to say: ‘I hate the faculty of memory. I hate memories’”. This meant something in my case as an artist, particularly because I was searching for a way to inform these works with the loss of memory I experienced after immigration, and that this experience later influenced my apprehension of memory as a multilinear system.
Figure 4: Memory Plains Returning: Memory Used by Adam Nash
The lack of any cues or references towards anthropocentric scale or reference made a significant difference practically in terms of ease and speed of working with VRML because it enabled telescoping of space into potentially endless interdependent levels. Each of the works manipulated some aspect of interest within the formal system presented by VRML. For example multiple nested cubes rotate around a common point, each with an attendant sound audible in proportion to proximity, or multiple geometries each rotating on its own axis, or scaling up through exponentially higher and lower stages along one, two or all three of X,Y and Z, or the scale jumping or layering available to the camera analogy in RT3D space, where the viewpoint is constantly zooming in and out. All these manipulations invited the user to reflect on the notion of a “multilinear system,” where “everything happens at once” (Deleuze and Guattari 328). Other factors, evaluated as positive, included texturing: some of the works used texture maps, albeit it in a more experimental mode than is customary on contemporary RT3D, while some didn’t. The two works that did use texture maps, Memory Boxes and Memorised Regret, evoked a more cinematic composition within the frame, verging on what could be characterised as motion graphic design. Certainly over time what emerged as important was the different ways different VRML browsers render the texture maps, a purely technical consideration that nonetheless significantly influences the visual outcome. Happily, the ease of working without textures also produced a subtle but rich gradient range of colours based entirely on the formal construction of, and interaction between, RGB and opacity (Red, Green, Blue, the basis of all colour rendering within VRML and its underlying 3D rendering system such as OpenGL or Microsoft’s DirectX). This range of colours is easily and quickly manipulated via relevant numerical values modified in a text editor, along with other qualities related to light and materials such as opacity, specularity (shininess), etc. Because of the broad standardisation of these fundamental elements of the digital image, this is far more resistant to technical differences between browsers, and is also very much a modular approach, since these small sets of vectors can be transported across many 3D environments. The visual quality shared by the individual works, resulting from the lack of texture mapping, visually contributed to a satisfying sense of relationship between the individual works, a certain sense of heterogenies held together without ceasing to be heterogenies (Deleuze and Guattari 329). The importing of sounds and positioning within the aural 3D environment was also achieved with relative ease via the text editor, inlining the sound file, in this case mp3s, for internet based performance.
Figure 5: Memory Plains Returning: Memory Forest by Adam Nash
As essentially a proof of concept, many formal technical considerations of working within the medium were well established, but the (virtually) linear navigation model and the lack of a real purpose beyond a technical proof of spatialised geometrical animations and sounds, or simply a technical demonstration of the medium’s post-convergent potential, clearly remained as problems. This needed urgent redress for the project to cohere and to adequately progress to achieve both Bolter and Grusin’s qualities of hypermediacy and immediacy (Bolter and Grusin 21-44). The hypermedia qualities of the work perhaps presented too readily, thereby preventing the ability of any immediacy, or sense of immersion. There was also a lack of affect that needed to be addressed. Was it related to the lack about pre-convergent uses of 3D MUVEs mentioned earlier; was that also a lack of affect arising from an uninquisitive use of a medium? Considering Memory Plains Returning as a container, it is useful to think of it in Deleuzian terms as a mode or complex relation of speed and slowness, where “Concretely, if you define bodies and thoughts as capacities for affecting and being affected, many things change” (Deleuze, Spinoza, 124).
Figure 6: Memory Plains Returning: Memory Plains by Adam Nash
A live (what would now be termed) mixed reality performance of Memory Plains Returning took place at several sites in the UK. There was a performer in the Cornerhouse Gallery in Manchester (Kema Ekpei), one in Bristol (Alex Bradley), and a performer at Folly Gallery in Lancaster (Adam Nash). Audiences came to either the Corner House Gallery in Manchester or the Folly Gallery in Lancaster. In evaluation, this was less than successful because audience unfamiliarity with the work and medium placed a strong performative expectation on the artists themselves to perform in the physical space. There was a lot of narrative conversation between the audience and myself (as artist/performer) about what was happening. This was because the audience was physically gathered in the galleries, watching me or the other performers log in. Had the audience logged in themselves, no explanation would be necessary other than navigational instructions. At the time these experiments were being carried out (2003), RT3D MUVEs were still a reasonably obscure phenomenon even within the digital or experimental art scene. That was the main lesson of the live performance. Later, from around 2006 onwards, the term mixed reality would enjoy some currency as an adequate description of this live event, and the expectation of a mixed reality performance has become so viable that audience/users will independently log in to experience the work.
As proof of concept, it was encouraging, with further experimentation recommended. Positive points displaying potential intrinsic qualities were the direct manipulation of scale, RGB colour space, opacity, lack of texture maps, and lack of anthropocentric scale of reference. Negative points were a lack of affect, and an episodic nature enforced by a somewhat linear navigation model.