Will Wright, Genius
I actually had written this in the previous post to further explain my thoughts on 3d glitches and mistakes but decided to give it it's own post:
Anyway here's a photo of me with Will Wright, the Creator of massively successful and innovative games such as Sim City, The Sims, and Spore.
I had a chance to hear his talk at Siggraph 09, and my word was in inspiring.
I wanted to talk about the current status of computer graphics and its amazing future. I'm not talking about Avatar, and oo ahh 3d! (Which is pretty impressive) But i'm still waiting for the standard screen w/o glasses part.
I'm talking about the state of which we're at where art is reverting back and exploring new aesthetics that isn't just about hyper-realism.
With new eye capture tech, The uncanny valley is appearing less and less noticeable.
With 3d graphics pretty much achieving the realism it was striving for, I notice that the industry is actually pulling back, in film and video games. And you are slowly seeing it like in Borderlands on xbox 360 cell shading.. or course Jet set Radio did that first, but was always a niche market game at best) Or even with Horton Hears a Who and the more recent Cloudy with a chance of meatballs.
But what I don't see as frequent is the minimalist, abract and raw animation, playblasted, and edgy, and rough work as accepted in the mainstream.. but it will eventually.. Have a look at low res pixel animation, it's exploding everywhere now.
low res graphic games are booming in the industry through xbox live downloads.
That's why David O'Reilly (I refer to him often b/c he's the first I've seen to receive accolades for his short film work in playblast, low res aestetics.
have a look:
Compression Reel from David OReilly on Vimeo.
And no, all the glitches just crappy compressed work or a mistake.. i'm sure it began as a glitch, but then by refining the technique, was able to harness it.
In history a lot of great things in science have been discovered by chance, like x rays, penicillin.. and viagra. And when I mean discovered, I mean in a sense of using it in a practical sense.
You ever work on your computer and the window freezes? And then you begin grabbing the window and dragging it around and around and making this cascading effect which is entrancing? I wouldn't be surprised if someone creates a performance piece out of that. (Kinda reminds me of sand art animation .. future post!!!)
As an artist, be it paint, pencil, chalk, or clay, the medium and how you use it is motivated by what you're trying to achieve in your art.
In art history, art began as cave drawings, then humans discovered perspective, pencils, paints, chiaroscuro, muscle anatomy, and arguably reached abilities to replicate realism. Then those crummy expressionists had to get involved.
Art began to push back and try to explore paint and ways of expression that wasn't so stringent to academia, and what came was an explosion (pardon me) of art possibilities.
Now in 3d graphics, those with the principle that it's all about hi res, with GI, displacement, normal maps, cloth, hair dynamics , that's fine. Now people are looking to push back and explore various ranges and trying to mix aspects of 3d together to create new techniques.... people are mixing 8 bit graphic paradigms with more realistic paradigms, or even them some.
It's funny how it seems that 3d graphics is related to limitless possibilties, but in a broader sense, we have gotten stuck in this 'realism' idea (among its umbrella of iterations), and it's the derivations that thrive from this.
Every art style has a confined (almost mechanical) set of rules (and exceptions)
to create a work of art.
But that can be discussed in another post!
When I was at Siggraph '09 last year, I attended Will Wright's talk about the evolution of computer graphics and gaming. He presented a slide show on the same parallel that I just said here (coincidence!) But I'm sure the thought isn't new, it just isn't in the forefront yet.
But the indies will eventually become the norm, (which i'm kinda afraid of it becoming over saturated and being seen in your next car commercial)
So if there ever was a stagnation in 3d art, it's opened up once again, and until 3d/3d holographic entertainment emerges, we'll be busy creating new and interesting aesthetics within this construct.
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