New Year’s resolution

Development Log

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

Development Log

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

Development Log, Kijkdoos

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

Development Log, Introduction, Kijkdoos, The Synthetic Image research project

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

Development Log, Die ochtend, in bed

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.

Creating realities, then and now

Development Log, Kijkdoos

This was written in the evening of 25 November in Madrid airport following a brief visit to the Prado museum.

After seeing the contrast between the old Flemish Masters, the “Primitives”, and later painters such as Rubens and Velasquez, it struck me again how a transition seems to have happened from an initial fascination with three-dimensional space to a growing focus on the two-dimensional picture plane. The early painters in Flanders did not depict reality. They created reality, a small piece of reality. This is further confirmed by the care that is put in the frames, which are often beautifully sculpted and painted. Typically, a frame would have a bottom part that is slanted, suggesting a floor or windowsill, further encouraging the interpretation of the painting as a space, not a picture.

I relate to this practice deeply, as this is what we, realtime 3D artists, are doing as well: we create a three dimensional world that is experienced in two dimensions (the screen) and we invite the spectator to imagine the three dimensions, to imagine that what they are seeing is real. And very often, rather than offering escape to a fictional reality, we want our work to become a part of your life, to connect with the reality you find yourself in. This is definitely the case for the dioramas of Cathedral-in-the-Clouds.

Rogier van der Weyden: The Descent from the Cross

Rogier van der Weyden: The Descent from the Cross – All of the figures seem to be standing in a box shaped exactly to snugly fit their bodies.

Rogier van der Weyden: Virgin and Child
Rogier van der Weyden: Virgin and Child – The frame continues in the painting, or the painting in the frame. One reality crosses over in another. Also notice how the bottom of the frame is flat, further creating a connection with the spectator’s world.
Rogier van der Weyden: Miraflores Altarpiece
Rogier van der Weyden: Miraflores Altarpiece – Each scene fits precisely within its frame, inviting us to imagine that these are three-dimensional boxes that form a part of our reality, rather than depictions of another.

The pictures by the Flemish Primitives may not be as realistic as those by later painters. But their invitation to imagine the reality (the box) that their characters inhabit feels very genuine. The paintings invite intimacy, privacy, contemplation. As opposed to Rubens’ work for instance: many of his scenes I’d be afraid to step into. It’s all very spectacular.

Pieter Paul Rubens: The Adoration of the Magi
Pieter Paul Rubens: The Adoration of the Magi – An amazing masterpiece, but not what we are going for in our dioramas.

I think part of the reason why the work of the Flemish Primitives is so unique is that it is early. Oil paint had just been invented and artists were experimenting, trying to figure out what to do with it. Another similarity to our current situation! I feel encouraged to embrace our amateurism and to develop a unique way to use this medium that does not rely on the tricks offered by the professionals.

—Michaël.

No funding for Een lege Wereld

Development Log, Een lege Wereld

Sadly our request to the Flemish government to support the writing of the scenario for Een lege Wereld has been denied.

In the notes they shared about the decision, the commission –as usual– expressed their appreciation for our professionalism, our long career, our international reputation and our original style. And then –also as usual, I’m afraid– they continue by expressing their lack of faith in our ability to make something beautiful. I don’t know what it takes to gain somebody’s trust as an artist in Belgium!

They liked the positivism of the beauty of nature as the central idea but doubted that that would be enough to keep the film interesting. They also think Meomi’s graphic style is insufficiently innovative and kitschy. Meh. Three rejections. I guess that’s it. We’ll have to figure out another way to get this project made.

—Michaël.

Cathedral-in-the-Clouds KS campaign draft

Development Log, Kijkdoos

I have started the creation of the Kickstarter campaign page for Cathedral-in-the-Clouds. We plan to launch the campaign on 21 October. Please have a look at the current draft and let me know your comments and suggestions. The video, illustrations and campaign image are just early sketches and placeholders. And some illustrations are still missing. But I’d like to take your input on board when continuing.

Would you back this project?

And if so, what reward would you choose?

If not, what’s keeping you?

 

PS: Don’t share the Kickstarter link. This is just for you.

PS 2: Here’s a new preview link. The video and page are now almost complete in terms of content. Let me know what you think!

Een lege Wereld

Development Log, Een lege Wereld

Een lege Wereld is the Dutch translation of and a project derived from a game concept called An empty World but evolved towards a post-game incarnation. We call it a film.

An empty World

An empty World was an idea for a game in which you play an ugly duckling who follows a river upstream and finds he became a swan when arrived at the source. The landscape below is filled with buildings and other human-made constructions that are decayed and overgrown with plants. But there are no people. The game does not explain why.

An empty World was designed for an easily accessible, uplifting game experience centered around seeing impressive vistas. After prototyping with a few volunteers, I submitted a grant proposal to a local government fund. When the proposal was rejected, I organized a pre-production period on our own expense. In this period I collaborated with Jessica Curry for the music, Marie Lazar as modeller, Laura Raines Smith for animations and above all Vicki Wong of Meomi, who concepted the visuals.

In my enthusiasm about the results of this phase, we published a teaser video.

In the mean time, government subsidies for games in Belgium had been moved from film to its own dedicated fund that subsequently rejected a request for funding the further development of such a non-conventional title. We had some conversations with Indie Fund but then put the project on hold because we had other productions to attend to.

Een lege Wereld

When I was liberated from the game industry, a new version of this idea came to me. Een lege Wereld would be an animation film that consists of one long camera travel over a landscape. Instead of a swan avatar, one would simply hear a voice-over narrating the story of how humanity solved all of its problems and created a perfect world of peace and harmony with nature. When the story gets to the part of how humanity ultimately disappeared, we have arrived at the source of the river and [SPOILER ALERT!] the voice breaks up and stops.

It is for the writing of this text that I have submitted another, modest, grant request. I should hear whether we will receive the grant early next month. I’ll keep you posted.

I see Een lege Wereld primarily as a film (Koyaanisqatsi is a huge inspiration) because of the ease of distribution of digital video and the potential of finding new audiences (I’d love to show it at film festivals!). But I also have a few ideas for very light interactivity. Nothing gamelike. More like playing with the dynamics of film (the player might control the progression of the film by swiping or scrolling for instance). I think this would make a perfect tablet app.

I’m also considering to create the whole thing in 2D, so we can use Meomi’s drawings directly instead of translating their style to 3D.

Beauty

This project, as is often the case here, is based on earlier ideas. I’ve long wanted to create something around common concepts of absolute beauty. Not the deep, contemplative beauty that I usually deal with (and that we hope to address in the Kijkdoos project) but the every-day “easy” beauty of epic vista’s, impressive clouds, sunsets, waterfalls, rainbows, dolphins, unicorns, and so on. Things that are often rejected by intellectuals as cheesy or kitschy but that nevertheless make our hearts flutter whenever we encounter them.

There’s many examples in the reference collection for this project: anemptyworld.tumblr.com

I want to explore this tendency in humans to be enthralled by the grandiose beauty of nature. Precisely because it can work as an antidote against the bitterness and cynicism that governs our societies today. Personally I get my kicks from Bach, Bernini and Botticelli. Many people don’t or can’t for whatever reason. But nobody is immune to the sight of glittering sparkles on the surface of a lake, rays of sun shining through the clouds, butterflies fluttering over a field of flowers, and so on. I suspect it may be more important that we experienced the joy of beauty than what exactly triggers that experience. And by “more important” I do mean politically, socially, ethically, and so on.

And for myself, next to excitement about inventing a Utopian planet, I just want to indulge in these easy pleasures for a while. Not that I expect that the triggers for these pleasures are simple to create. But there’s a lot of reference material out there! Humans love beauty.

—Michaël.

Cathedral-in-the-Clouds

Development Log, Kijkdoos

Cathedral-in-the-Clouds

Thanks for your feedback on last week’s introduction of our new project codenamed Kijkdoos! We’ve developed the concept quite a bit, in part as a result of trying to figure out how to present this project on Kickstarter (more about that in a future post).

We had already been thinking of physical presentations of one or more Kijkdoos pieces in a room. And we had been fantasizing about a Virtual Reality simulation of such an exhibition, possibly with additional “magic” (i.e. things that wouldn’t be possible, or very difficult, in the real world). This idea has now morphed into a general umbrella that covers the entire concept. We’ve named this project Cathedral in the Clouds.

cathedral_logo_sketches

Not only have we sang the praises Saint Bavo cathedral in our home town of Ghent as a source of inspiration so many times that at one point it was mentioned on our Wikipedia page, we have also, alongside our desire to work with Christian iconography mentioned before, had several ideas for videogames that take place in simulated churches. So the puzzle pieces are coming together. It’s very exciting!

cathedral_sketches

Our cathedral will only exist “in the clouds” that is to say in Virtual Reality. It’s an almost imaginary place that we intend to expand as new Kijkdoos pieces are being created. For every Kijkdoos piece we will add a chapel or niche to the cathedral building where the art can be experienced, much as is the case in actual cathedrals –except that in cyberspace there’s no physical constraints to expansion.

We don’t expect VR — which should enter the market in the fall or early next year, I believe — to become accessible to a wide audience very rapidly. As such, a certain pilgrimage will be appropriately required: to VR goggles connected to a computer that can run the simulation.

The individual pieces — what this project is all about — will still be shared as separate apps, downloads, web sites or videos, whichever medium seems to fit. In a way the Cathedral is mostly a name to bundle the entire project.

Although we are very excited about building a virtual house of cyberworship! Especially since we’re embracing the idea that it takes years, decades to build a cathedral. I imagine it will start as a rather sparse place and become increasingly ornate as the project grows. I hope that we can use the opportunity for patronage in much the same way as traditional churches: people fund certain parts of the church or pay for the creation of a particular altar piece, sculpture or painting. There’s wonderful opportunities here for Kickstarter rewards. But I hope this sort of patronage can continue beyond that. We’re building a temple for our cyber-community!


It was in the Gothic Revival Notre-Dame Basilica in Montréal where, in 2011, the desire to create art with Christian iconography really set its fangs in us never to let go.

As you might have gathered from the logo design (which is by no means final: this is not commercial, we don’t need brand consistency), we’ve been inspired by Neo-Gothic (or Gothic Revival) style lately. It’s a style of architecture and decoration that peaked in the 19th century. Neo-Gothic artists rejected the rationalism that came out of the renaissance in favor of reviving the style of medieval cathedrals. A typically romantic movement that often produces very ornate spectacles (if somewhat less devout than the original).

Once again, we’ve started a Tumblr log where we collect reference materials for the project. Have a look: http://kijkdoos.tumblr.com.

There’s no way you could be as excited about this project as we are. But I hope you like where we’re going!

–Michaël.

PS: Feel free to ask questions in the comments. We have no secrets for our patrons.