All posts by Michaël Samyn

Raphael’s archangels and Louvre inspirations

The two paintings of the Archangel Michael by Raphael were the direct reason for wanting to visit the Louvre again. Paris being only two hours away from our home, I travel there regularly. But Raphael hadn’t moved me much in the past. And seeing the two paintings in person didn’t blow me away this time either.

The paintings of Archangel Michael by Raphael in the Louvre. The small work on the left was painted when the artist was 21 years old. The large painting on the right was created at age 35, 2 years before the artist’s death.

The first painting is very small and created when Raphael was in his early twenties. It’s interesting mostly because the figures of Michael and the monster are set in a desolate landscape that seems to refer to the book of Revelation (in which the Archangel makes a prominent appearance). It’s a mysterious scene depicting monsters, souls of the damned and a city on fire. Young Raphael is trying to tell a big story in a small picture.

The second painting is very large, and painted two years before Raphael’s early demise. A much more mature work, the painting depicts Lucifer and Michael in an otherwise empty landscape, dark and rocky at the bottom, where the demon is being trampled, with some signs of volcanic activity, bright and peaceful behind the triumphing angel. The diagonal composition and decorative flying fabric already announce the baroque style in an otherwise high renaissance image.

In both pictures Michael is wearing golden armor, covered in some areas by blue fabric (a skirt in the first and a cape in the second). This inspired the thought that perhaps my Michael could be covered completely by body hugging golden armor that would only leave the face free, prompting the spectator to wonder whether he is made of gold. He is an angel after all, not a human. I may also copy the idea of the light flowing fabric on top of the armor.

Or perhaps the color of his skin is simply gold. It does appear so in the second painting. Only the decorations in the metal show the difference between skin and armor. Maybe in the diorama he could be fairly naked.

In both images, Michael’s wings appear heavy, immobile almost, as if they too were made of gold. That’s an interesting idea, making the figure seem more like a statue than a person (which would fit the diorama concept). But I also like the opposite: bright white feathers, divine, not his own, directed by God, as if Michael is a puppet on strings. Feathers. Fingers. Feathers everywhere. Maybe Michael has many hands?

The scale-like pattern on Michael’s armor looks similar to Lucifer’s skin.
The blue fabric against blue sky makes him look ethereal.
The spear point is cross shaped. If it were to pierce the devil, it would leave the imprint of the cross of Christ in the victim’s flesh.

It came to me that in none of the images of Michael and Lucifer that I can recall, the devil is ever killed. Michael always only subdues him. In both Raphaels he balances on one leg, holding down the demon’s body. He dances on the evil. Perhaps this is significant. Perhaps he does not kill because the battle against evil is an ongoing, never-ending process.

Maybe Lucifer and Michael are each other’s mirror. Both angels, demonstrating the opposite paths that can be taken.

I discovered a few more depictions of the Archangel on my stroll through the museum. The Ercole Roberti had a similar thing going on with hard armor covered by flimsy fabric, transparent even in this case. Lucifer appears completely naked. It made me think that perhaps in my version he could just be a naked human, not a devil, just a man with dark, grey or greenish skin.

The piece by the anonymous medieval artist referred to as the Maitre des Anges Rebelles is very spectacular. Floating in a sky seemingly ablaze with gold several golden angels battle dark demons falling to a small dark planet beneath. In the top triangular part God on a throne surrounded by angels and saints much as described in the book of Revelation.

When I wandered off into the Object d’art section, references to the archangel didn’t stop. I saw a curious bronze lamp by Félicie de Fauveau from 1830 depicting Michael accompanied by four winged knights in heavy armor resting or asleep. There was also a bronze clock from the same period with hands in the shape of snakes featuring a scene with a very feminine archangel towering upright over a fallen demon who seemed twice their size, snakes everywhere. And finally a very delicately sculpted ivory spectacle with an elegant archangel standing or floating atop two demons, one upside down, whose positions seem to be mockingly imitated by cherubs alongside Michael. Again, Michael dressed and the demons naked.

What makes the synthetic image so powerful?

The Louvre is an interesting place for my research because the collection contains both the older paintings that inspire the Synthetic Image project and the younger ones that don’t have the right effect. The difference is very clear. But hard to put into words. Let alone apply to my medium. Sadly at the moment the museum rooms where the strongest representatives of the power of the Synthetic Image, the Northern Renaissance, are hung were closed for renovations. I may need to resort to juxtaposing similar reproductions to figure it out, for now.

There were many artists copying from the masterpieces on the wall. But invariably their copies seemed to be lacking the essence of the original. It feels as if modern copyists don’t see the picture in front of them. It’s like they are trying to paint a photographic reproduction. Preferably with some improvements in terms of realism. Maybe they don’t understand that what is bad about the original in terms of realism is what makes it so good as art.

It made me think that the mantra they hammered on in art school is wrong. Maybe we should not “paint what we see”. If we do, we seem to miss the point. We stay on the surface, quite literally, and our paintings are mediocre. Maybe we should “paint what we know” instead, what we know to be true, how we feel inside that things exist. It doesn’t need to look real. It should feel real!

As my stroll slowly approached the modern age, paintings started to become more narrative. They were clearly trying to tell stories. Not the myths and legends that everyone knows but very specific tales. It was quite impossible to decipher many among them. And yet the artists seemed to try their best to express this or the other story. A waste, if you ask me. I think referring to stories is fine. Just assume people know them. Even if they don’t, they will feel the mystery. Or just add text somewhere, telling the story. Another mantra, “Show, don’t tell”, doesn’t seem to apply to The Synthetic Image. Just tell, and make a great picture. Don’t conflate the two. Don’t try to express the story in an image.

Another thing I noticed is that figures in more modern paintings (starting already in the 17th century) are striking because they feel like real people. You can sense their personality. Their strength or weakness. The painting records and expresses this. Without trying to rise above it. And while that often brings a pleasant experience to the spectator, it’s not what I am after in the Synthetic Image. I need more distance, more archetypes perhaps, figures unlike you and me, but that do, perhaps, sometimes experience emotions that we do too. Only they know how to deal with them much better than we do. They are exemplary. Unlike we.

―Michaël.

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The Endless Forest multiplayer in Unreal

The Unreal Forest: step 1

We have made quite a bit of progress in the past few weeks with the remake of The Endless Forest in the Unreal Engine. Thanks to the generous support of many of you, we can make this work our highest priority. We are continuing to raise funds to support this project. You have almost collected the entire amount!

Since The Endless Forest was an early project in our career as game developers, and because it has been developed over several iterations, we haven’t been very orderly in storing the many assets that make up the game. So we’re going through our archives and fishing out every model and texture, sometimes even finding things that never made it into the game (but that might now!).

Because of the engine we used back then, Quest3D, many of the files are in obsolete formats. So part of the work involves converting everything to a format that we can use in Unreal.

Unreal Engine uses a very different paradigm to game creation. It lacks certain features we took advantage of in Quest3D. But it also does a lot of things much better. As a result, however, we cannot simply translate the logic from one program to the other. We have to find new ways of expressing the same ideas, ways that suit the engine well.

I’m delighted to say that we have solved two of the more problematic bits of logic now. Both are related to the endlessness of forest.

First we needed to find a way for the forest to wrap around endlessly so that when the deer arrives at the end of the forest, it finds the beginning again. After some initial despair about not being able to figure out how to implement the same logic as in the old game, we got a brand new very simple idea that actually works fine.

But wrapping one avatar around from end to start isn’t enough. We also need to be able to see other players’ avatars even when they are at the beginning of the forest while we are at the end. We found a solution for this too. And one that has the additional benefit of only rendering the deer that are actually visible, which is good for performance. The system involved separating the “pawns”, as Unreal calls the player avatars, from the actually rendered deer. That caused quite a few headaches dealing with the rather arcane server-client structure of Unreal networking, which seems to be entirely built around preventing cheating, something we don’t care much about in the Endless Forest (in fact, we consider many ways of “cheating” as part of the fun).

Anyway, as you can see below, we can now run a simply networked game with deer who see each other in Unreal now.

The Endless Forest multiplayer in Unreal
The Endless Forest multiplayer in Unreal

We were very eager to share this mini-triumph with you and tried hard to set up a server that you could log into. But this is an area where Unreal is a lot less streamlined than in most others. Creating a dedicated server actually requires downloading and compiling the source code of the engine, and packaging the game through an external tool. In the end we succeeded in running the game on our local network. But only for a minute or so, before clients were mysteriously disconnected.

We haven’t been able to try this on the internet because our current game server is an old 32 bit Windows XP computer and this is not really supported by Unreal. So we’re asking our host to move to a new server machine.

We are eager to continue the work on this project. It’s very exciting to see the deer run around in their new home. We will keep you posted on our progress.

 

Thank you for your support!

 

—Michaël & Auriea

 

We are eager to coniSave

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Synthetic Image research in January

The first week I had reserved for The Synthetic Image research project sadly suffered from several unwelcome distractions and interruptions. Excessive rainfall had caused clogged drains in our new home that took two days to investigate and repair. Our car had a flat tire that needed to be fixed. I had to do some accounting work and there were the usual groceries and guitar lessons.

I did manage to look up the locations of paintings I want to study. I wrote an introductory text to the project, described my diorama creation plans and analyzed Crivelli’s painting of Saint Michael that I hope to see one day in person in London.

I started the tutorial series by Angela Guenette for Character Modeling in Blender. This taught me some handy modelling features that I wasn’t aware of. And I learned how to model an eye with a recessed iris and an extra layer for the cornea. The realist purpose of this method did make me wonder if it would be at all useful towards achieving the “Primitive” style I am after. But I need to learn basic skills.

On Friday I set up a rudimentary diorama prototype in the Unreal engine with the default mannequin and cursor key input. While simplistic, it does give me a lot to think about. I also briefly investigated Virtual Reality camera handling in Unreal.

An eye in Blender and a mannequin in Unreal.

Unfortunately I suffered from an inclination to procrastinate on Friday. Which is silly because as soon as I do actually start working, I enjoy it a lot. But then there’s too little time left. I’ll do better next month!

Tomorrow, Sunday, I plan to visit the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent to hopefully take a closer look at some of the Mystic Lamb panels while the restoration crew is not at work. And maybe there will be other pieces that attract my attention.

— Michaël Samyn.

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Carlo Crivelli’s Saint Michael

Carlo Crivelli: Saint Michael

Carlo Crivelli: Saint Michael (about 1476)
90.5 x 26.5 cm
tempera on poplar
currently in the National Gallery in London

This analysis was done on 18 January 2017 based on photographic reproductions found on the internet.

One of 4 panels from an altarpiece in Ascoli Piceno, a town in the Marche region in East Italy where Crivelli died in 1495. The other panels depict Saint Jerome (in red, holding a book and a building and with a lion at his feet), Saint Lucy (holding a palm branch and a round plate with eyes) and Saint Peter Martyr (in monk’s habit with a sword in his head and a dagger in his chest). I didn’t find an image of the entire altarpiece.

Michael is looking down at the demon under his feet. He is holding his sword behind his back. Not so much as if he is about the strike, but in rest, as if he knows he has won and is in control of the situation. This relaxed attitude is confirmed by the delicate pose of his left hand as it holds a scale between thumb and index finger. In the scale a tiny naked kneeling man and woman appear lighter than the silver tent-shaped weight in the other scale. Maybe the tent represents the heavenly Jerusalem (the tabernacle of the lord). Crivelli has omitted one of the ropes that would be holding up the scales presumably not to intersect with the figures. The scales are tilted towards the spectator in a way that defies either gravity or perspective.

Michael’s chest is covered by ornate golden armor centrally featuring a baby’s head, possibly a cherub, and flowers on his nipples in an ornament that vaguely suggests breasts. His skirt consists of several layers, three of which appear to be made of feathers. Maybe they refer to his wings that are only partially visible, folded behind his back. They seem to have the same colors: red, green and white. His thighs are covered by armor in the shape of lion heads. His calves seem to protrude out of the lions’ mouths. Right under his knees appears a golden fish-scale pattern, perhaps indicating chain mail. Suprisingly, and confirming his relaxed attitude perhaps, his lower calves, ankles and feet are bound in cloth, leaving an opening for bare toes. The bandages have the same striking pale blue color as the armor on his thighs, underneath the lion heads. He wears a short gold-rimmed cape that is green (velvet?) on the inside and red or pink (satin?) on the outside. Crowning his half long golden hair in page style is a pearl band with a gem in the center and a green feather that looks like a palm leaf. Behind his head a golden aureola with ornamented edge.

The background is a golden floral geometric pattern (like wallpaper) bordered at the bottom by an ornate terracotta frieze. The floor is made of yellow marble and is less than a meter wide. The scene takes place on some kind of ledge. Two shapes in the ornamented border of the ledge seem to mimic the demon’s head.

The demon beneath Michael’s feet is green. He lies on his back. He is naked. His feet are brown and remind of bird of prey claws. He has a tale like a lizzard’s that ends in his crotch with something like a sex organ. His body is shaped like a male human’s but his skin consists of scales, like a reptile’s. On the back of the calves we see some curly hairs. His left hand clasps Michael’s calf while the right reaches up. His fingers end in black claws. He has short bat-like wings, green like the rest of him. The demon’s head is covered by short brown thick curly hair and hangs over the ledge. He has two curved horns that look like those of some kind of gazelle or even an insect. His ears are long and pointy and remind a little of a donkey’s (also because of the white hair inside). Two white fangs and a red tongue protrude from his red lips. He might be smiling. Like Michael’s, Satan’s eyes are not visible. He seems to be looking into Michael’s eyes.

Because the two figures are engaged in an almost intimate staring context, the scene feels closed. Or maybe Michael is simply making sure that the demon cannot escape, for our benefit.

Since the humans in the scale are too light, presumably they are damned. Maybe that is who Satan reaches out for. Perhaps Michael’s calm signifies resignation. Maybe the scene is not static at all and we see Michael putting away his sword, preparing to release the light-weight humans to the devil. The baby on his chest armor seems shocked or even sad. The demon seems to be gurgling “These two are mine, Michael! Give them to me!” And Michael looks at him and then at the scales and he knows that Satan is right. There’s nothing he can do for the little people.

That the humans are man and woman could refer to Adam and Eve, the first humans that Michael delivered to evil, to the extent that he chased them out of the Garden of Eden.

Michael’s face appears calm. He knows how these things work. “I am stronger than you, Satan. But rules are rules. These two are yours. They are too light for Heaven.”

The entire composition fits tightly within the vertical panel.
There are some very light drop shadows behind Satan, to the right, consistent with the light in the entire scene, coming from the top left. Here and there dark lines appears between two shapes, giving the drawn effect that is typical for Crivelli’s work, but these might be interpreted as shadows too. Some are blurrier than others, suggesting depth.

Part of this painting is made in relief. In a reproduction it’s hard to see what exactly. The ornaments on the armor definitely, perhaps also on the arm, and the locks on the legs. Maybe the head band too (silver!). And the gem? The aureola’s border seems relief as well. Elements of the scale maybe too.

 

— Michaël Samyn.

 

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Diorama of Archangel Michael

Statue of Saint Michael by Remi Rooms
Statue of Saint Michael by Remi Rooms on Saint Michael’s bridge next to Saint Michael’s church in my home town of Ghent

The choice of Archangel Michael as subject of my diorama is obvious: he is my patron saint since I carry the same name (although my atheist parents named my after the Florentine renaissance master Michelangelo Buonarroti). As a result I have always been fascinated by depictions of the archangel.

Historical depictions

Archangel Michael is most often depicted as defeating Satan, another angel who rose up against God. I don’t believe this story is mentioned in the Bible but it is an important part of the premise of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which I have recently read in a splendid Dutch translation by Peter Verstegen. According to Milton the expulsion of Satan from heaven lead directly to the seduction of Eve and the subsequent fall of man. One can sometimes see the Archangel Michael guiding or chasing Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden (also mentioned in Paradise Lost).

The second most occurring depiction of Saint Michael is in scenes depicting The Last Judgement. In the biblical book of Revelation he, once more, defeats evil. But in paintings he is more often shown holden a scale and weighing people to separate the ones who will be saved from those who are damned. Sometimes he battles Satan over a particular soul. So Michael plays a prominent role both at the beginning and at the end of the world.

Personal meanning

There’s a certain symmetry is the expulsion from Paradise and the Last Judgement: maybe we are still living in the Garden of Eden. But we have eaten so much from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that Satan has more or less made Earth his home. When God finally gets sick of all our silliness he sounds the trumpets and sends Michael to clean up the mess.

I do not literally believe in the stories of the Catholic faith. But I find them very inspiring (much like others may find Greek mythology inspiring). And since I grew up and live in a place still filled with many pictorial references to Christianity, I feel comfortable in this narrative atmosphere.

There’s some interesting parallels between the figure of Michael in Christian stories and Perseus in Greek mythology. Perseus defeats Medusa (a monstrous woman with snakes on her head), and then he fights a sea monster to save Andromeda (Eve?).

The idea of ultimate evil residing in hell has become somewhat laughable now that humanity has reached a level of malevolence that would make any devil proud. For me personally, the evil that Saint Michael battles is first and foremost the evil within myself (or ourselves when extended to society). The stories and depiction of Michael remind me to be alert and to banish evil to hell as soon as it rears its head. Not an easy task. Which is why it takes a Prince of Angels to handle it.

As the weighing of souls shows, defeating evil is only one part of the problem. The other part is recognizing it. And that, in my experience, is even harder to accomplish.

So there’s a personal spiritual motivation to my choice of subject for the diorama.

Diorama design

A more general aspect of angels that fascinates me is that they are supposed to be genderless. In painting, angels like Michael are often depicted with a male body, an androgynous face and long hair. Maybe I will take that aspect further in the diorama.

A painting by Crivelli inspired me to depict both the defeating of Satan and the weighing of souls in a single scene. This fits well with the idea of a vertical diorama that you scroll vertically: moving towards Michael’s feet trampling the monster may feel like descending into hell. I think this would work well in the screen-based presentation of the diorama.

For the Virtual Reality presentation I will need to do more research. On the one hand I like the idea of being confronted with a life size angel in virtual (sacred) space. But on the other I am attracted to the idea of an excessively large Michael figure, almost architectural and having the user literally travel down his body into hell.

 

—Michaël Samyn.

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New Year’s resolution

I like traditions. So I use the beginning of a new year to resolve to try out something for a year, to see if it improves my life. I’m pretty good at sticking to these resolutions.

2016

Last year I decided to not consult any news sources. In the beginning that included Twitter but I slacked a bit. And I did read the occasional news article that was on a subject of particular interest. Still, not browsing newspapers or watching televised journals has greatly improved my life. It helps of course that corporate media these days are simply propaganda channels: I know what they are trying to do. That makes them easy to ignore. I will continue this habit in 2017.

A less ambitious resolution was to not favorite things online, in an attempt to not play along with the “neoliberalization” of every aspect of our lives. That also made me a lot happier. I found myself perfectly capable of liking what somebody said without having to express that to the world (or to the corporations that feed on the data that we produce for them). It made my experience of social media much more enjoyable. So I’ll keep that one too.

2017

In 2017 I want to rediscover the internet that I got to know in the 1990s. An internet where every node in the network is equally important. An internet where we create our own identities, even just for fun. An internet that is not “Real Life” but a parallel sphere, one where we can experience other ways of living.  An internet where creation is in fact more important than creator.

We can choose to pick Life from the Tree, or Death.

I want to explore the old network partially as an aesthetic exercise, a fantasy, a fiction, alongside my interest in Virtual Reality, that other revived 1990s relic. But also in earnest. Strictly speaking, all the elements that made up the internet before are still present today. We don’t need to go offline to escape the malaise caused by social media. We can just dive underneath.

This New Year’s resolution is simple: not to use search engines. I want to fight the reflex to type whatever I’m thinking of into Google and instead go directly to the websites that have the actual information. My browser remembers the names of these places automatically. Or I can bookmark them. I have set my standard search engine to Google Images, to catch any reflexive searching. I allow myself image search because it is vital to my work.

Searching actually remains quite efficient even if only images are returned. So there’s some room for cheating. But ultimately the point is to avoid searching as much as possible. And to replace it by good old surfing: exploring the world wide web by hopping from link to link. Discovering things that the efficiency of search engines hides from me.

 

Happy New Year!

—Michaël Samyn.

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Every poem is a cathedral

Notes scribbled down in a small notebook while visiting the Louvre in Paris with a feverish head last week.

There is a place underneath everything where nothing has a function, where everything exists without reason or purpose. Pure joy of being.

Art, when it is beautiful, connects to that place.

Truth is absence of meaning.

The ornament is not a decoration on top of reality. It is what is underneath, and above. When we become ornament, we have fused with the All. A portrait is striking not when it reveals the nature of a person but when it connects the person to that place where nothing has meaning and all is beautiful.

The idea that language is a collection of words that describes reality feels very comfortable to us. But what if language was first? What if the concepts were first and all reality is just an illustration of those concepts? What if definition (sharpness) makes things less real (removes things away from their being)?

What we commonly refer to as reality is just this fine sharp line, a border, between the vast worlds below and above, the underworld and the heavens.

Each and every painting is a window through which we can see outside. Outside of this slim sliver of reality onto the vast planes of existence.

Every poem is a cathedral. A door to heaven.

A painting turns reality into beauty. And beauty is so much larger.

The purpose of art is to be so beautiful that all meaning seems trivial.

In paintings all of reality is made from the same material. Venus is one with the clouds. The buildings grow out of the trees.

A historical art museum visit is tragic. It starts with the golden glory of god to culminate in a wonderful self aware decadence. The more we appraoch our age, the more cracks start showing. By the end of the nineteenth century everything falls apart and comes stumbling down. Gone are the beauty, the kindness, the generosity. Gone is the belief in goodness.

Art after nature is absurd. This is how art lost its way: Artists mistakenly assumed they were making pictures of nature. But in reality the order is reversed: Art is where the real is! With the attention to nature, art lost all its tenderness and empathy and turned the spectators into voyeurs rather than participants. This already shows in Ingres, despite his best efforts.

Virtual Reality observations

When I started considering VR for new creations at Tale of Tales, I didn’t imagine a very big distinction between our previous work in realtime 3D (artistic videogames) and what we would do in VR. After all, I never thought of our work as screen-based exactly. For me what mattered was the creation of a living world on the processors and in the memory of a computer. The screen was just a way to show this world to a human.

So initially I thought of VR as just another screen, another way to see the worlds we create, not essentially different. But I was wrong. Even after only a brief period of investigation and prototyping it has become clear that the VR headset turns the computer into an entirely different medium! Everything is different in VR, few of the old conventions or habits are useful, nobody really knows how to use VR well yet. It’s as exciting as it is annoying.

What follows is a list of observations made in the last six months working on our project Cathedral-in-the-Clouds, an attempt to fuse the sacred and cyberspace in a contemplative experience. The text ends with an argument about the importance of imagination for art vis-à-vis its apparent absence in VR.

Time limits

Because wearing a head-mounted display is uncomfortable, my intuitive inclination in real time 3D to focus on the creation of open worlds must be tempered. Discomfort causes most VR experiences to be brief, and thus a certain linear design is preferable. Furthermore there is a radical rupture between being in the 3D world (while wearing the headset) and being outside of it (not wearing the headset). One cannot casually experience a VR piece. Which makes it challenging to create “art that becomes part of people’s lives”. I don’t want people to escape into our art, preferring to make a connection between the art and their bodies, their environments, their memories, their personalities.

Body size awareness

One of the things I like about VR is that it gives the user a certain awareness of their body by implying it in the 3D scene. Little of the trickery with scaling and framing that is common in videogames works in VR. Your body quite literally becomes the measure of all things. This makes working with scale very interesting: since we are all acutely aware of the size our bodies, it’s much easier to make big things look impressive, for instance.

Realism

Related to the awareness of the body’s size is the requirement of a certain level of visual realism in VR. The way we used to fake volumes and details with textures doesn’t work very well. But stylized shapes and toylike objects do. When they are realistically shaded, in fact they appear more wondrous than photographically realistic objects. The mind quickly adjusts and accepts a photographically realistic scene. But believing in the reality of something that we know cannot exist in the real world is a much more magical feeling.

Visual primacy

I don’t really feel immersed in a VR scene. Because VR is such a visual medium. The whole experience centers around what we see.

But it doesn’t offer the visual range that we are used to. A certain distance is required to see things, for instance. Things that get too close or very far become hard to see ( the documentation of the Unreal engine recommends putting VR objects in a range of 0.75 to 3.5 meters away from the virtual camera).

Another aspect of the visual nature of VR is that the only thing that matters is what happens in front of you, since humans simply don’t have eyes in the back of their heads. So despite the 360 degrees of potential, you only actually see what’s before your eyes.

Problematic sensuality

Contrary to the awareness of scale, the visual primacy in VR more or less reduces your body to a set of eyes. You become body-less, a (human-sized) ghost, a spirit. You can’t distinguish things that happen very near to you. As opposed to a third person avatar on a regular screen who is clearly immersed in the fictional scene and whom you can easily empathize with. VR feels more detached. It’s purely visual and it feels a lot less sensual.

The sensations in VR are triggered by the proximity to objects and characters. It feels very voyeuristic but you never feel embarrassed. In part, I think, because VR is so extremely private.

Uncanny safety

One interesting sensation in VR is vertigo. It feels very nice to stand on the edge of an abyss because in VR you always feel perfectly safe. Nothing bad can happen to you while you are wearing the headset. The world looks real but it cannot harm you. Paradoxically VR allows us to escape into reality. The sensations feel physically real, but you know you are always perfectly safe.

The nausea that VR can cause in a user, more or less obliges designers to be exceptionally cautious. You can’t mess with people in VR because it’s so easy to make them physically ill. This certainly reduces the palette available for artistic effects.

VR feels so real to our bodies that VR experiences need to be a lot safer than actual reality. Our mind then quickly gets accustomed to this unrealistic level of safety and basically becomes untouchable, unmovable, an impregnable fortress.

Immersion without imagination

VR is touted as the ultimate answer to our desire to be immersed in a simulation. But because VR so directly puts us in a physical environment, it bypasses the imagination that is necessary to deeply engage. It’s purely visual, purely physical. It triggers physical reactions but does not stimulate thinking or feeling. Further hampered by the awkwardness of the headset that you can never forget about.

VR, counter-intuitively, creates a distance between the scene and the spectator. You are always outside, not involved, a fly on the wall. You have no presence in the virtual world. The virtual world does not believe you exist. At least not as a person. Maybe they recognize you as a camera, an observer, someone they have no emotions or thoughts about, someone they merely tolerate (causing one to wonder about the reasons why). You’re in the middle of the action but you cannot be harmed. You are perfectly safe emotionally. If only because you need to constantly monitor how you are doing physically (am I not bumping into things in the actual space where my body is? Am I getting nauseous? Do I look weird wearing this thing? -Is someone watching me?- Mustn’t forget to fix my hair when I take it off).

The experiential realism of VR is exactly its weak point. Because art tends to affect me most where it deviates from the familiar. And art is where I find the deep emotions and thoughts. Realism creates distance. And it distracts, rather than immerses, if only because it forces our brain to be continuously amazed by the simulation, drowning all other reactions we might have.

We don’t need imagination to believe in a VR scene. But without imagination, it is much harder, if not impossible, to access the areas in our being that bring great joy and deep insight. Imagination creates an emotional bridge to the object we are observing. Without imagination, we remain distant and separate.

Artistic problems

Despite my objections, I believe wonderful things can be created in VR. Providing its artistic problems are solved. And I worry a bit about that. I have seen this before. Videogames also have an enormous amount of artistic problems and they never got solved. Artists rarely lead videogame creations. The tools are unsuitable and the corporate structures don’t allow it. And much like VR, videogames are dominated by technology. So engineer after engineer tries to solve the artistic problems. While the artists are all but chased away from the medium by press, corporations and the public alike.

So here’s to hoping that artists will be encouraged to solve the medium’s artistic problems. Otherwise, just like videogames, VR will remain unfulfilled potential driven by desire never satisfied.

—Michaël Samyn.

The Synthetic Image

We have always felt a kinship with the Old Masters. Since we use computer technology in the modern age, our interest in such analog art forms, figurative presentation and often religious subject matter may strike as odd. But next to the practical similarity – we use the high technology of our time, just like the early oil painters did – we also share an interest in what I like to call the synthetic image.

The synthetic image is created by a human. It can be, and often is, modeled after life but the shape and color and texture are entirely man-made. Somehow such images can possess a power that goes beyond any image that is created mechanically, either directly through photography or with significant aid of optical instruments.

This is not a theoretical principle for me. I have learned through experience that synthetic images tend to affect me more. I don’t know if this is true for other people as well.

Maybe a synthetic image can be so powerful because it is a subjective creation that appeals to the subjective perception by a spectator. A mechanical image, created through photography for instance, on the other hand, is never entirely subjective. There’s always an inhuman aspect to it. Maybe that creates a distance that reduces the power of the work.

The curse of photography

Long before photography, painters developed the realism of their work. And while paintings from the baroque, rococo and salon periods certainly have their charm, they never move me quite as much as early paintings do, with their wonky perspective and skewed proportions.

When photography grew out of the desire for realistic depiction, it more or less ruined figurative painting. In a very direct way it coincided with the birth of abstraction in art. One can imagine many painters wondering about the point of painting figures or landscapes when there was a mechanical device that could reproduce reality in a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the effort. And maybe it is only now that photography has become intensely ubiquitous that we can start to understand the great value of non-photographic, synthetic images.

Photography is a wonderful tool. And out of photography some great new art forms were born. But it has ruined the more traditional forms of depiction. Even when artists today draw and paint figuratively without referring to any photographic images, their work never affects me as much as the old art does. Because something about it still reminds of photography, which hollows out the experience. Photography has changed the way we look at reality. So much so that it has become difficult for us to create a representational image that is not infected by the photographic eye.

A painting that looks like a photograph is always disappointing to me. Instead of experiencing a transcending, universal, symbolic image, we see a picture of some guy or some woman. Flat, meaningless, empty. And no matter how hard we try, we can’t escape the impact of photography on our eyes.

The power of creation, and the opportunities offered by realtime 3D

I think the computer offers a way to escape the stranglehold of photography: through realtime 3D. Just like the pre-photographic painters, computer artists create images out of nothing. We place vertices in virtual space, connect them with lines and fill up the triangles between them. We can’t really use photographic references because we are working in three dimensions and because the computer demands specific construction methods to allow for processing.

When I study early renaissance painting, especially the Flemish Primitives, I sense that they too were thinking of their practice more as modeling virtual worlds than creating pictures of reality. The religious subject matter helped the desire to transcend the mundane. And the newness of the technology stimulated invention. Those early paintings are as much about evoking physical sensations of material and space as they are about creating shapes. All of this is familiar terrain to the realtime 3D artist.

Realtime 3D offers us once again a way of creating synthetic images, potentially with the same power of early painting. This does require a conscious effort of the artist to move away from the photographic image and towards a more symbolic one. We need to resist the temptation to imitate reality offered by a technology built by engineers with no pictorial imagination. Because then all we have is that reality. And not something that transcends it.

The computer screen, with its two dimensions, is not our canvas or panel. We are creating realities in virtual spaces. Virtual spaces that are alive through the processing power of the computer. We are not creating images but objects (much like sculptures, but even paintings are objects! –unlike photos which are prints on paper or light on screens). Even if there is no visible difference (when displaying our work on a screen), our objects continue to really exist in the virtual (unlike photos or films that are only pictures of a reality that does not exist anymore).

The experience of art, or being in the presence of the work

I have never had a deep aesthetic experience with a reproduction of a painting. The magic only happens in the presence of the actual object. It doesn’t even need to be the original work – this is not fetishism – but it needs to be a real painting or sculpture. Photographic reproductions don’t work for me.

Even though realtime 3D does not possess the physical properties of painting or sculpture, a similar effect can be observed. Realtime 3D exists in another type of reality: it is running – right now – on a computer.

One needs to be in the presence of the real work of art to have a deep aesthetic experience. Digital art is real when it’s running on the computer’s processors. Rendering kills the art. Screenshots don’t work, even videos don’t have the same effect (linearity kills realtime). We have to be in the presence of a software application that is running now, in the same time as the one we inhabit, for the art to affect us deeply.

And we need to embrace the synthetic nature of these artworks. By constructing realities out of nothing with means that circumvent the photographic way of seeing, we can, once again, approach a power and mystery of art.

—Michaël Samyn.

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“Die ochtend, in bed” prototype

Last week we finished the prototype of “Die ochtend, in bed” with a grant from the Dutch Gamefonds and the Dutch Foundation for Literature  for a literary game in collaboration with a writer and presented it to a jury in the Letterenfonds building in Amsterdam. Since this happened on our wedding anniversary, we decided to spend the night and visit the reopened Rijksmuseum the next day. In fact, Auriea went ahead to look at prints and drawings. And I did the presentation with our collaborator on this project, novelist Gaea Schoeters.

We showed the prototype running on my iPad, explained the concept and walked through its creation history. And now we’re waiting to hear if we get the grant for development of the complete game.

Die ochtend, in bed (That morning, in bed) is a fairly abstract presentation of a scene in Gaea’s novel De kunst van het vallen (The art of falling) in which the new lover (played by the computer) shows objects to the protagonist (played by you) who then says something about the object.

Initially we wanted to offer four ways of responding: truthfully, lying, evading or ignoring. I made a HTML 5 prototype in Tumult Hype with placeholder images and a computer-generated voice.

The design was inspired by our love for interactive CD-Roms of the 1990s. One of the ideas was to expand each object scene as a sort of puzzle to discover the four options.

Based on this prototype, Gaea started cutting up her novel and putting parts of it back together in a branching narrative.

DOIB-gaea_threads

I was quite excited to have a writer design our game. In order to get a better overview for myself, I first implemented Gaea’s design in a web-based Twine project.

How this played in a browser didn’t matter much to me. What I was interested in was the flowchart that Twine creates as you put things together.

DOIB-twine_diagram

Based on the initial HTML 5 prototype, I created a new one, with a design that cheekily refers to popular social media interface (for a brief moment I considered imitating Tinder). The voice clips are from a recording that had Gaea made earlier of reading her book for a library for the visually impaired.

I wasn’t happy with this prototype. I felt that the playfulness in Gaea’s novel of associating different stories with each other didn’t work well in an interactive context. I think this is because, as a player, we don’t trust the computer to make a meaningful connection and quickly assume it’s random. While in a printed book, we know very well that any juxtaposition is fully intended by the author. Another problem with this design was its complexity both to develop and to play with. I also felt it was way too long and Gaea was especially concerned that it felt endless and pointless, lacking some kind of conclusion. I was also bothered by how the four responses (truth, lie, evade, ignore) limited the emotional response a player was allowed to have.

While we agreed on what was wrong about the prototype, and on the kind of experience we wanted to create, we got into a serious argument when proposing solutions. For a while I was worried that we would not be able to continue with the experiment. But we worked it out and we arrived at a beautiful compromise that we are both happy with.

The solution lay in embracing the emotional effectiveness of a traditional narrative arc and using a combination of several short story lines rather than one long one. We chose a four stories of twelve plot points. You navigate from one plot point to another but you can only choose up to three consecutive plot points in a single story line. So the game forces you to jump around, even if you hadn’t done this spontaneously. To add variety, several plot points have multiple versions that the computer chooses between randomly.

DOIB-plotpoints

We decided to use 3D models instead of images. So I programmed the final prototype in Unity, specifically to run on an iPhone or iPad. We chose a handheld platform because we like the idea that players can replicate the fictional situation of playing the game in bed. For some of the models we’ve used photogrammetry, which we intend to experiment more with. For this prototype Gaea made new recordings of herself reading the excerpts from the book.

The presentation of this prototype at the Letterenfonds in Amsterdam went very well. The people there were very friendly and they had arranged for two press interviews as well. I think we will learn next week whether they will grant us the money for the full production of the game. We would like to add a choice between male or female voice, and hire actors to perform the text. We want to add more variations to the plot points (this includes more objects as well), an introduction that sketches the fictional situation, improved the visual quality, add some effects here and there. And we want to do something with the final story that you play, maybe save it locally, or share it with friends to play back somehow.

If we don’t get the funding, I think we will finish the prototype on our own expense without expanding it, and release that. In either case, the game would be available for free, initially for iOS only. Hopefully we can do Android too.

—Michaël.