Whenever I have had some time in the past months away from the more classical research-oriented work, I have been catching up with some of the latest developments in Machinima and other virtual reality and/or game-engine methods for art and design.  While for some more purists, this admittedly sounds geeky and probably as exciting as a can of tuna, I have found that there is quite a lot that can be done and said using these “machines.”  With the usual reservations, of course.

The primary problem I have with more classical animation, drawing and painting (and 3D) is that it is very time-consuming.  Being sometimes peripatetically cross-displine and cross-media, I am interested in doing things in almost every possible format that I get my hands on.  But, say, if I wanted to create a digital character with some facial expressions and mix it with some photography or video to get some idea across, doing these with the old ways would take days to complete.  A simple expressive character, in the end, is rather difficult and laborious to create properly and with style.

Now take a game engine such as Spore.  What these virtual reality and/or game engines allow one to do is quickly create a prototype of some idea or another — develop an “element” that can be used to explore an idea at its initial stages.  It is not perfect by any means; you do not get full control of what you get.  You get instead a rather rich set of parameters to play around with but this is still not the quasi-complete freedom you get with doing things analogically. However, what you do is get possibilities do things that would not have been available before unless you wanted to spend days and days creating every little element yourself from beginning.

So a part of the Uncanny Valley experiment is to develop a workflow that allows the quick production of such “mixules” and / or sketches that can be later worked with to develop more complete projects and designs.  I have played around with Spore mostly here as its the most recent of these games but will probably do my rounds around Sims, Second Life etc and whatever will be useful.  Each of these sketches have taken — on average — about 30 minutes to complete.  Most of that to try to work shadows etc (though in some pictures I have not spend enough time on this admittedly…)

The theory here could perhaps broadly be said a play around “locative media” and “ubiquituos computing” where the overlap of virtual and non-virtual reality is predicted to be the next evolution of the Internet. I am especially interested in conceptualizing the blurry notion of reality between the virtual and non-virtual as an experiment in both content and form.  Something close to evolutionary art but not quite.  I will do a series based on this eventually when the idea crystallizes but meanwhile just working out some of the techniques here — also thinking how some of these engines could be perhaps used to do short videos etc.

I will also post a tutorial up soon about how such “rapid prototyping machines” can be used …

[Tools used: Pentax K20D, Spore, Photoshop Cs3, San Miquel]