Outside
the Light-Cone
Enjoy!
Mark Domenic Amadeo Tripp Pesce
If, as Picasso suggests, great artists steal, we'll need a body of work which articulates the sacred. This work attempts to identify the qualities that underly the sacred aesthetic elecronic.
This paper establishes a theme in my own work which will be a major focus of my efforts through 1996; that is, the creation and maintainence of a global infrastructure for global imaging and global imagining. Using T_Vision as a starting point, what can we do to bring the planet to the desktop?
This piece is companion to Opening The Third Ear: Humanity at the VERGE of Communion, which I delivered on the same date one year before.
Performance given on 21 September 1994 at The Exploratorium in San Francisco, as part of the Bay Area Virtual Reality Special Interest Gruop (VERGE). This performance is divided into three main areas, identified by elements:
Paper presented at the First International Conference on the World Wide Web, in Geneva, Switzerland, 25-27 May 1994.
This work describes a visualization tool for WWW, "Labyrinth", which uses WWW and a newly defined protocol, Cyberspace Protocol (CP) to visualize and maintain a uniform definition of objects, scene arragement, and spatio-location, which is consistent across all of Internet. Several technologies have been invented to handle the scaling problems associated with widely-shared spaces, including a distributed server methodology for resolving spatial requests. A new languague, Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) is introduced as a first-pass proposal for WWW visualization needs.
HTML version can be viewed with a WWW viewer such as Mosaic or lynx. Also available are RTF (rich text format, which can be read by almost ANY word processor, save to local disk) and text-only versions.
VOCE is evolving as a spontaneous international "membership by consciousness". Artists, writers, entrepreneurs, healers, and others are converging via word-of-mouth toward a common ground, all taking part in growing a collective "tree of voices" - and fun.
VOCE has been evolving as performance workshops where individuals go through a simple process of introspection and expression. Traditional and modern composing techiques are used to open the individual voice, access self-knowledge, and sing the "inner song".
The VOCE core focus is to bring its empowering processes to neglected parts of our communities: hospitals, prisons, schools. Recent workshops have begun with South Central LA teens, helping these youths to discover their own song.
The VOCE network has neither a commercial agenda nor leadership. Rather, all those involved are actively taking responsibity for what needs to be done to spread its benefits. All have a chance to give and take charge. VOCE continues to branch out on its own across the river of imagination. It is a common ground waiting for your interest, your ideas, your story, your initiative.
For more information call (213) 221-VOCE, or send us mail.
Mark Pesce
Paul Godwin
William Martens, Ph.D
OUR PLANET IS SINGING ITSELF ::: The Web can be our Ears.
Our planet is singing itself, as we speak, at this moment the sound as heard outside our orbit is strange and cacophanous.
Audio is perhaps the most powerful navigational tool available to us. It is at once vastly imaginal, highly evocative, abstract and very specific.
The WORLDSONG PROJECT is designed to create a coherant matrix of audio, so that we can hear and navigate the informational world, using the multitude of audio cues that are already available to us.
WORLDSONG is a collaboration to develop world-wide audio navigation for the Internet. Beyond the current "hit and play" audio associated with Netscape, AOL and other browsers, or even the background ambience or broadcast-byte work being done with RealAudio, WORLDSONG is designed for surfers to "hear" the sounds of our planet and use them to navigate the Web. This aural travel through our planet's realtime symphony can create deep feelings of global continuity and exploration, all from an individual workstation anywhere on the Web.
WORLDSONG will eventually include conference spaces such as SOLACE (Sacred On-Line Active Communal Environment) with real-time spatio-located audio for business, meditation or entertainment.
T_Vision (ART+COM, Berlin) is an earth visualisation project. It provides a virtual globe as a multimedia interface to visualize any kind of data related to a geographic region. The virtual globe is modelled from high resolution spatial data and textured with high resolution satelite images.
T_Vision represents a prototypical visual interface for the type of navigation we are envisioning. Our audio plug-in is designed to function in conjunction with a T-Vision-type browser. This satellite based model will call on servers worldwide to spool the updated audio and visual materials.
WORLDSONG creates a protocol for audiofile types and sizes which music studios and individual users can follow for participation in the project. The stratafied classes of sound allow the software to comingle, crossfade or mix the various sound bytes. Should a navigator wish to explore one sound further, they may gesture and the source will be traced allowing access to the full audio file, its origins, history, creator, neighborhood and download-ability.
As we integrate Worldsong with VRML 2.0 and JAVA, these monophonic sound bytes will be spatialized in real time allowing visceral fly-throughs of cyberspace. The navigational aspects really come into play as T-Vision is translated into VRML 2.0 and the three dimensional planet is combined with its (now spatialized) audio counterparts.
Contact Mark Pesce, Paul Godwin or William Martens for more information.
Artwork by Dimensional Graphics
Virtual Reality, especially in its evocation as cyberspace, the realm of holosthetic communication, is the nuclear weapon of the human mind. This paper proposes a framework for understanding the effects of immersion within holosthetic media, a framework which can be summed up in the following phrase: The creation of a world necessarily implies the creation of a world view.
This work was presented at the Third International Conference on Cyberspace, at the University of Texas at Austin, on 14 May 1993. It caused a bit of a stir at the conference, and led to an open discussion of vivogenics. This edition has a new prologue, written in April 1994, for its publication in _SPEED_: An Electronic Jourhal of Technology, Media, and Society.
This is one of the works that I am most happy with.
A poem I wrote at Winter Solstice 1993, concerning the self-awareness of Internet. Section 4, "Shape", really needs to be performed live with a chorus of VOCE chanting as accompaniment, to get the full effect. Call this poem an early, hermetic statement about the Worldsong.
Short piece written for Unshaved Truths.
Really ought to be
subtitled, "Or How I Learned to Quit Worrying and Love Cerwiddwen."
My first published piece, professionally, appearing in FringeWare Review #2.
Freedom in Cyberspace and why it's important and how we might find it. In this I argue that crypography is the defense industry of the 21st century, and, by inference, that the cypherpunks should be considered the heroes that they are. It was my research into telepathology, discussed at length in "Final Amputation", that led me to write this piece.
First article in WiReD, "VR Hurts", about the dangers of Head-mounted Displays...
Second article in WiReD, "Sharing Cyberspace", a product review of the VRex VR-1000 3D projection display technology. For the "Street Cred" column.
Third article in WiReD, "SimSwim", about the CyberFin Dolphin Swim Simulator, a really cool example of trans-species synesthesia via virtual reality.