Abstract
As the world around us is transformed into digitally enabled forms and processes, aesthetic strategies are required that articulate this underlying condition. A method for doing so involves a formal and conceptual strategy that is derived from collage, montage and assemblage. This triple “age” is termed “troiage”, and it uses a style of computational apparency which articulates the edges of our current representational forms and processes as the semantic elements of culture. Each of these component aesthetics has previously had an important effect upon different areas of contemporary art and culture. Collage in painting, montage in film, assemblage in sculpture and architecture, are recombined via algorithmic methods, forefronting the structure of the algorithmic itself. The dynamic of the aesthetic is put into play by examining binary relationships such as: nature/culture, personal/public, U.S/Mexico, freedom/coercion, mediation/experience, etc. Through this process, the pervasiveness of common algorithmic approaches across cultural and social operations is revealed. This aesthetic is used in the project “The Scalable City” in which a virtual urban landscape is created by users interacting with data taken from the physical world in the form of different photographic techniques. This data is transformed by algorithmic methods which have previously been unfamiliar to the types of data that they are utilizing. The Scalable City project creates works across many media; such as prints, procedural animations, digital cinema and interactive 3D computer graphic installations.
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“Real Art and Virtual Reality” by Sheldon Brown, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, Volume 31, Number 4, November 1997.
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See for example any of the works off of my webpage, http://crca.ucsd.edu/sheldon—each of them constructs a mechanism for framing meaning that has content specific derivations from more ubiquitous forms.
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The ENIAC could perform 5,000 additions or subtractions or 360 multiplications of two 10-digit decimal numbers in a second.
http://www.upenn.edu/computing/printout/archive/v12/4/crackpot.html
A 3 Ghz Pentium 4 (which weighs considerably less than 30 tons that the Eniac weighed) performs about 6 billion floating point operations per second, or about 16 million times more than the Eniac. At the high end is the Earth Simulator computer, run by several Japanese scientific research agencies in Yokohama, (http://www.top500.org/lists/2003/11/1) which measures about 40 teraflops, or about 100,000,000,000 times faster than Eniac. Somewhere between the Pentium 4 and the current supercomputer champ is this misapplication of Moore’s Law, which was actually coined to describe the growth of transistor density on a chip.
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Artworks that didn’t use actual 3D computer graphics, but which used cultural forms that were being created via computer graphics include MetaStasis/MediaStatic 1999 http://crca.ucsd.edu/∼sheldon/metastasis/index.html and The Vorkapithulator, 1992 http://crca.ucsd.edu/∼sheldon /vork/index.html.
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During 90’s interactive, 3D graphic environments were called “virtual reality”. Now it is thought of primarily as computer gaming environments. The technologies have migrated to the masses and transformed their implications.
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Perspective schemes are particularly important to current interactive cultural forms such as computer games and virtual reality. As silicon perspective engines have become embedded into all contemporary computers—perspective representations have become the norm for video game activities.
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Leone Battista Alberti, On Painting, 1435. Florence.
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Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, Translated by Andrew Hurley Copyright Penguin 1999.
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Jorge Louis Borges, Other Inquisitions 1937–1952, University of Texas Press, 1964.
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Sheldon Brown is Director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts at the University of California, San Diego. He is a Professor of Visual Arts and co-founder of the California Institute of Information Technologies and Telecommunications. Within CRCA and Calit2, Professor Brown directs the Experimental Game Lab, where new cultural forms are created by innovating techniques applicable to the computer gaming and scientific visualization.
crca.ucsd.edu/sheldon crca.ucsd.edu www.calit2.net crca.ucsd.edu/sheldon/expgamelab
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© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Brown, S. (2010). Troiage Aesthetics. In: Argamon, S., Burns, K., Dubnov, S. (eds) The Structure of Style. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12337-5_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12337-5_9
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