Andy Best

This design retrospective returns us back to the first generation of web based virtual builders. They will explain their work in there own words in their own pages. In this page I offer the reasons they were selected.

The format for this site is drawn from “Modern Artists on Art” a collection of essays, talks, manifestos and presentations compiled by Robert Herbert. It is a slim book that holds the personal writings of the first generation of modern artists. These artists broke from the realism of the past and sought to design and express the world anew. Along the creative frontier, they trekked great conceptual distances and were bound less by what they could create than by what they could comprehend. Technology allows us vast power to create. From small interfaces and data displays to entire online (gaming) universes, we can build great things.

Rebel Narratives – Andy Best

Andy is a showman, a ringleader, a carnival barker and a damn fine artist. At digital conferences he is a person impossible to miss and impossible to not wish to speak with. His works are child-like, playful, as well as mischievous and decadent at times. Seeing only the surface, I dismissed his work initially as being juvenile, crass, and more fitting for Comedy Central’s Adult Swim than for serious consideration.

I then went to work for Andy in Helsinki, Finland and the first lesson came quickly. It begins with my recognizing my cultural bias as an American. The lens of Comedy Central that I earlier applied was proof of that. In Finland, I found at the time Andy at the cutting edge of a rebellion against the standards of Scandinavian design. Sleek, clean, white, wood, thin, dark, metal, elegant, simple, and flowing were replaced by raucous forms, energetic twists, and comic acts. To see the influence of his (and others) efforts, a trip to IKEA and the playful objects there is all that’s needed.

I left Finland to get a Master’s degree at Georgia Tech under Dr. Janet “Tetris has a Narrative” Murray. Catching the Ludic – Narrative discussion at the source would greatly shape my design thinking. The mental division between interaction and story (or rules and fictions) would become a great tool for dividing large conceptual challenges and processes into smaller more manageable ones and thus aid in the actual production of my work. I still believe in it as tool, but it no longer rings in as truth. This is Andy’s fault. This divide between Ludic (interactions of play) and Narrative does not exist within his work. Stories are actions, actions are stories and all the while, the only requirement is that you play. In the end, Andy reminded me to play.

Noted Interaction – John Klima

John is an understated individual and upon meeting him SIGGRAPH 2000, I was not surprised to learn he had worked for Microsoft as an engineer. As a last minute addition to the program, his work was unknown to me. He then shows me his latest work - Glasbead. It was beautiful. Its appearance is visually akin to a planet with many similar moons or a circular fish tank with similar fish. Neither moon nor fish, the objects that circle the global are actually hammers with rings about their shafts. Click on a hammer drag it to set it in motion and then when it hits another hammer, a tone is produced. Adjust the ring up and down on the shaft and scale it outwards to influence the nature of the tone. Placed in cyclical orbits along multiple directions, the hammers create uniquely organic rhythms. It is a musical instrument, one easy to play yet hard to master. It also was connected to a network so that you could play with friends online.

This type of beautiful instrument could only exist in the virtual. On that level, it’s clever, but John goes far deeper than beauty. Glasbead is a lesson in interface design. Music allows designers unique opportunities to control, access, and influence data. Data that is static and must be set as well as data that changes over time. This project reminded me of a problem with my own virtual interface design in my Salvatore Dali menu. In my motion was fun, useful, but not entirely efficient. I think now that the virtual, the three-dimensional allows us to interact and interface with objects in motion more completely than two-dimensional interfaces. I’m not entirely sure what that means in the long term, though it seems to be emergent in game design. In the short term, I know I want to apply the rhythmic possibilities of Glasbead to spin record/CD-like objects and create music mixes. I’d like to be a DJ, scratching silicon and dropping bytes of sound (or maybe make funky instruments for the Wii or Rockband)

An Architecture Indivisible from Interface. - Cristiano Bianchi

In the early days of virtual design, no one impressed me more than Cristiano. Trained as an architect to create functional, artful buildings and landscapes, he was one of the few designers who understood the virtual landscape existed within a computer screen. Mouse and keyboard, memory and database, processing speed and network connections were acknowledged, respected and exploited. More impressive was his range. Some works, like his Science Museum crafted interface design elements so seamlessly they disappeared from the realm of the unreal. One of the most ignorant acts that a virtual designer can do it place objects under or inside a faux glass case. Copying reality to the point of destroying any functionality is one of the most common mistakes made by developers. In the Science Museum, Cristiano saw the need to visually frame objects and items and he simply placed a wireframe box around them. Additionally he added a menu of interactive actions, like one finds on a website inside his space, and labeled bright and large with the word “Menu”. It may seem silly to give praise to this simplicity, but it’s worth remembering that real world buildings (aside from restaurants) don’t use the term menu very often. More important I suppose is the subtle acceptability that merging architecture and interface design affords.

On the extreme end of the spectrum comes works like his Sex Pistols gallery. It is literally a traversable database. Imagine a grid of squares with one axis geared to each band member. The other axis relates to time. Now imagine that only the square you stand in is visible, and holds information relevant to its grid position in terms of band member and time. This data square is not solid or walled and looking along each axis shows lesser-materialized data on members and time. To walk through the space is to walk through a structured array of information. It is ingenious and had he been a student of mine, I would’ve told him to refine the actions on these two axes. Instead, he did exactly as I and so many others have done – he kept going. He allowed people to travel up and down, which brought an exponential increase to the dataset.

In my own works, I explored structuring space along data driven lines. “Timeline” was rooted in a branching timeline and had a nifty heads-up map that tracked your overall location in the timeline as you also moved through it. Later works, like Diagrammatic Space, a three dimensional diagram that could be rotated from the outside and roamed from within hold their inspiration in the efforts of Cristiano Bianchi

Post Everything – Adam Nash

Adam Nash is the only member of this group to move to SecondLife. In doing so, he carried the knowledge of this earlier generation forward. For that alone, I’m grateful. Yet I have to wonder how much his current admirers really understand. Adam’s work sits just on the artistic side of the boundary between beautiful novelty and groundbreaking revolution. His musical concerts, like “Memory Plains Returning” features a concert hall of empty black space, the musicians are not faux humans - but instruments large and abstract like buildings, and the audience reduced to faceless gray balls that become a singular audient. The music shifts and changes with the positions of the building instruments. The audient member’s movement also influences what they hear.

Given the depth of the abstraction, it is easy to dismiss the work as a novelty. Understanding the power of this work requires you to reflect on the otherside of the equation. If asked to design a musical concert in a virtual world, would you build an arena? Would you assign seats and herd the audience into rows looking down upon a distant stage. Would you place tiny faux human avatars on that stage and then use two-dimensional screens above. Would you ignore all the possibilities of virtual space and worse impose all the unwanted limits of real concerts on the viewers. Would you be so foolish? Pull a slender cover of representation over the structures Adam had construed and you have the equivalent of immersive MTV.

That immersive MTV space is not where the revolution ends. The departure of the Avatar from the limits of faux human form holds implications for the whole of virtual design. Virtual worlds are now designed to hold a digital human frame and in so doing, put in motion a series of flawed design perspectives as the limits of realism become implicitly justified. If the musical audience accepts the form of this new concert, how long will it take before they want such powers for themselves?

I cannot declare the human form as unneeded in the virtual, but I can prove that it is often cumbersome and unnecessary. You see Adam Nash was among the very few to see my shape-shifting poetry readings in VNet’s Town Square. Adam learned, just a little, from me. His work in music went further than I ever imagined and through the use of concerts opened a very plausible path to a very unique future. As for myself, I’ve been applying these very principles and possibilities in a virtual classroom. The work is more practical, representational, and according to my students more valuable and enjoyable than playing a game. As their teacher, let’s just say I enjoy being empowered beyond the boundaries of videogame characters.

fabric | ch ::
(Chris Babski, Stéphane Carion, Chris Guignard & Patrick Keller)

This group of artists, designers, and programmers used to fill me with dread. Not because their work was bad, but rather the opposite. They typically won whatever festival or event they entered into at the time, which means I would lose. I dislike losing. Thankfully, their work deserved the praise it received and few people have consistently produced such esoterically artistic, critically designed, and functionally innovative works. I’m also happy to say they eventually (in 1999) asked me and five others to create work for a multi-user gallery space. It was a beautiful structure that I will discuss in detail after this section. The first order of business is not entirely about the success of the gallery, but rather the comedy of constraint.

Each artist was allotted 87k in total (code and images) with which to create something of artistic value inside our individual rooms. One might think that 87k would limit us to small works, barely able to fill the space. The truth was far different. As designers of virtual works all, the artists had been accustomed to building within the infinite domain of digital space. To be suddenly confined to a space the relative size of a mobile home was innately frustrating. Many of the artists rebelled against the tiny, realistically sized rooms. Andy Best placed a large monster in the space and forced the issue of compression mischievously back upon the visitors. I placed a large red button in the center that usually made the room flutter, into disappearance and be replaced by a huge open zen-like installation. Visitors suddenly were surrounded poetry, kinetic art, and coy fish images set within a lazy blue pulsing global boundary. Since the red button behavior was unshared, only my visitors had their gallery disappear. They could roam about in an entirely different reality and see what others, still bound by the gallery structure, could not. Those not pushing my red button seemly walked through walls, floated in ceilings, and discussed that which others would not know.

The deepest rebellion came from Cristiano Bianchi. His “Babel” was simply a wireframe box with letters on the sides, set floating at eye height. Inside this box, one would see another smaller lettered box. This may seem innocent and straightforward, but upon entry to the box, he reduced the visitor’s avatar’s speed. In this abstract space, scale is often judged by the speed of our travel through it. By altering the speed of the avatar inside the box, he effectively created a larger space. It does not end there, for as mentioned above, there was another smaller lettered box at eye height in this box space too. Moving into it would again lead to seeing a smaller lettered box and having your avatar speed reduced. Through clever programming this cycle was infinite and as infinity blended with letters “Babel” was born.

The gallery lessons did not stop there. The architecture of the space taught me how to express three-dimensional space without relying on realism. It is a trick I see in most videogames and one I try to pass on to my students. The gallery that fabric | ch had built reflected the broken, angular, architecture and virtual visions of the early1990’s. A purposeful deconstruction I suppose. Most developers build rectangular rooms, ponder the emptiness, then decorate with chairs, tables, light fixtures, plants etc. They rarely if ever stop to think about using the space to create a sense of space. A sense of three-dimensional space is created by breaks and angles in walls to capture light at different levels. Three-dimensional space is also created by repetitions of boundaries or edges in almost a faux molding or wainscoting effect, and even the use of wireframed lines that play in visually coordinated groups that serve underline, highlight, or break other boundaries in the space. Game spaces like World of Warcraft and Champions Online use such principles so artfully within a narrative that viewers rarely realize the tricks being employed.

Conclusion

In an age of information, knowledge does not disappear, it merely gets filed away. Such is the case in the development of virtual worlds, interfaces, spaces, and realities. Given the speed of it’s history, as measured against the length of our imagination and the shortness of our attention span, it is surprising we can recall anything at all. The relentless pace at which the future arrives seems to make the process of filing such information akin to throwing trash out the window along a digital highway.