Illya Szilak (DrSzilak) Week 2--- Atomic Vacation
On Sunday, I presented a paper entitled "Surfaces and Spaces: Narrativity in VR" at the Electronic Literature Organization Annual Conference, held this year in Victoria, B.C. . I specifically look at the role of text/language in spatialized narrative to about 50 digital writers/humanities types. It was really enthusiastically received and a lively discussion followed. For those of you academically or theory-inclined, I've put links to my paper and slides. https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxFsB_7ofjCAVFFCalUzN2NmcjQ https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxFsB_7ofjCAZ2xSUkV6RzJyNmc At the conference, someone played Brian Eno's new song The Ship in which he mixed original lyrics and found text into a computer algorithm to create the lyrics. I did the same thing for the robot girl's poetry. It is the last slide you see. A remix of my own text, T.S. Eliot and Rilke's Eighth Duino Elegy. This is part of thinking through the use of text/audio narration in my Atomic Vacation Project. I am also posting images from my open studio at BANFF that I completed at the end of May. In it I explored the visual aesthetics and made an initial foray into the kind of language games I want to construct in landscapes. Just to remind, this is the story told by a little "Japanese" robot girl "Shizuku", the lone inhabitant of a rocket ship looking for inhabitable planets. When a nuclear apocalypse occurs on Earth, she cuts off communication. This loss of input initiates an Easter Egg program inserted years ago in her memory banks by Ray, the Japanese-American neuro-linguist charged with teaching her how to be "human." It is a cell phone video of Ray saying goodbye to the robot girl. She is also saying goodbye to everyone, though, because she knows if it ever plays it will be because all communication from Earth has been lost. A goal this week is to finish the script for this video for the actress that I will then hire. Her backstory is that her father was a child when Hiroshima was bombed. One of the environments will be a grey, black and white landscape of destruction. The user must walk across the landscape to find fragments of computer remixed poetry buried in the rubble and create a poem out of it. There are no right answers. It is really a meditative exercise on the limits of language in the face of mass destruction and tragedy. Below is some of the audio voiceover text. Note, that the robot girl does not distinguish between her own speech and other people's speech. I watch Ray speaking to the camera, her face sticks to me. This was an image from hundreds of years ago, now just reaching. I wonder If she would recognize me. I caress my face, tracing nose, mouth, skeleton. I do not think so. Though do I not have the same round nose and eyes like little shells. Ears like shells, nails like little shells. But, my silicon skin is degenerating. My fingertips fall in potholes like pits on the surface of a moon. She slipped into me like that. A finger in a hole. Voice in an ear. Perception ends by being merely an occasion for remembering, that we measure in practice the degree of reality by the degree of utility, and , finally that is our interest to regard as mere signs of the real those immediate intuitions which are, in fact, part and parcel of reality. Memories only become actual by borrowing the body of some perception into which it slips. —————————————————————- It’s me, Ray. You probably don’t even know who I am. And, even if you do remember, if you’re watching this, it means I’m already gone. But, you see. I just didn’t want you to leave forever, without saying goodbye. ————————————————————— Ray is drunk. She sing-songs. This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, like a man slipping on a banana peel. She laughs. Then, holds her head in her hands. The video ends. I search for bytes of her in every system, but, nothing returns. ——————————————————————— She did exist. Something that was is not the same as something that has never been thought of. Godel’s theorem must apply to cybernetical machines, because it is of the essence of being a machine, that it should be a concrete instantiation of a formal system. It follows that given any machine which is consistent and capable of doing simple arithmetic, there is a formula which it is incapable of producing as being true—i.e., the formula is unprovable-in-the-system-but which we can see to be true. It follows that no machine can be a complete or adequate model of the mind, that minds are essentially different from machines. Panoramic picture of my studio at BANFF. You see Shizuku's "mind map" a data visualization of her memory banks. One of my goals this week is to look at different kinds of data visualization software for this map which will be accessible on the web. Below were mockups for aesthetics and language games for VR landscapes that the player will traverse in order to find "rainbow teardrops" (because robots can't cry) and help Shizuku recover her lost memories of Earth and Ray. I gamified them for the studio visits including burying a QR code that opened to Slim Whitman singing "Rainbow in Every Teardrop". The letters tacked to the wall below the postcard landscape are my 9 month written correspondence with a 94 year old nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan project. They will be included in my VR game, perhaps in the web-based "mind map." No--I never think small. :)
