You might celebrate. This blog entry will be shorter than the usual ramble. During the period since the last entry here, the real world introduced a hooked pole and yanked me off the stage where I normally pipe on about things I’m doing creatively and said “Never mind that! You’ve got X,Y & Z to do in RL”
Consequently, my time working on personal, creative works has been curtailed and reduced to grabbing moments where time permits.
At the time of writing, I’m on the cusp of the first holiday break since 2019. I’m also doing a little soul-searching regarding keeping a blog. I think that these are a good idea. As you might have noticed, I tend to treat a blog like a diary. I think that this was the original spirit of blogs before the world lost its attention span and the term TL;DR became ‘a thing’
If I’m to believe what modern blog critics and experts have to say, then my entries are all wrong. They should start with a question, in which the reader can respond with a ‘Yes’ , then I should put great efforts into holding your attention, whilst keeping things short, sweet and with some kind of reward for having read until the end.
Hmmm.
I’m 99% certain that I fail at this on every level, but is that a bad thing? If your answer isn’t ‘Yes’ feel free to read on. If the answer is ‘No’ You might as well jog-on.
My blog entries are always written in my personal journal, then copied and pasted into a web page.
Sure, I could edit it all down and cater towards an imaginary audience. At the same time, I don’t promote any of my blogs or have expectations of who might actually be arsed to read it.
It’s here as a record of my own consciousness, it cascades and rambles because it communicates my inner process, the reader (If anyone actually reads it) does gain some insight into how picture 1 leads to picture 2 and all the mental gymnastics which happen in between. If you are the reader, I can assume that if you like the images, then you might find how they come about, a matter of interest. If you do, then that’s what this blog is all about. You might be a future team member or employer, so my words are fairly WYSIWYG.
What I miss out in point-making, I make up for with personality.
OK, I promised that this would be shorter, so here goes:
Real world problems aside, I realised during the end of March and onset of April 2022 that I’d have to fall back on short-term experimentation. If I have a magnum-opus up my sleeve, then know that as a semi-cyborg, my creative objective in this life is to leave some kind of sprawling record of my inner worlds in a pocket Metaverse which can be explored when I’m dead and gone.
This is largely why I write, and create art. Developing the skillset to deliver the goods is a byproduct more than it is an overall objective.
Without wishing to labour any previous points, much of my inner life and the crucible of my inspirations comes from dream imagery. I’ve probably said it before, but I view dreaming as the imagination untethered. For every bright Idea I have whilst awake, I have titans of imagination always bearing down on my waking mind, the moment a new day begins. Dreams tend to be the ultimate expression of bio-machine learning, as they offer novel imagery which remix the everyday world into unparalleled levels of originality.
The most recent example of this is in the following graphic:
(I haven’t quite got a name for this piece yet, but the working title is ‘Lost in time’ )
There’s a dream narrative attached to this image, having met-up with my long-dead grandparents, I wandered around a dream version of my neighbourhood, I saw a telephone pole with thick cables which had images of spooky looking children from decades ago floating around the wires.
The memory of this episode was so potent, I felt compelled to express it, so I carried out a preliminary 3D version using Dreams on my PS4 (As seen above) then added some post processing using Affinity Photo to add the kids and the house. I’m working on a Blender version of this image at the moment, the final aim will be to make a vignette scene which can be viewed in Unity with a VR headset.
If the end product gives you, the user, a close rendition of the still image above, in 3D, then I can tick “Getting people to see what my dreams look like in VR” off my bucket list.
Whenever dreams become less vivid, normally due to lunar cycles, I tend to fallback on my old physical, analogue dream diaries. I have a few handwritten, hand-drawn books in my arsenal, so I periodically delve into one of those, find a dream that I like, and start the process of re-imagining the outcome using my modern tools.
For example; during 1999, a dream in which I happened to find a small LED lightbulb, which sported a small glowing human skull , left an image which has persistently nagged me to do something with it.
If LED stands for light emitting diode, then my dream converted this concept into a DED -death emitting diode.
Left: 1999 dream diary doodle of DED. Right: 2022 Blender render of the same subject.
Recreating the image in Blender was short and sweet, but visually much closer in spirit to the memory of this vintage dream. I further embellished the image after making the Blender model, by adding sound and a small degree of animation in post. Here’s how it turned out.
Returning to the hypothetical ‘magnum opus’, objects like this will be findable, collectible items within my pocket metaverse. Who knows what purpose these objects will serve? Perhaps they’ll have a hidden use, possibly a key to unlock another area?
Maybe you’ve read other entries and thought “But Matthias, what about your psychogeographic explorations of previous places that you’ve lived? Didn’t you say that you were working on some kind of VR-based time travel experiment?”
I did, dear reader, I did.
The main thing to consider here, is that these projects are designed to be connected. When in VR, there is absolutely no reason why the user can’t traverse between historically recreated locations and dreamed locations. If one is to create an immersive record of consciousness delivered spatially, then VR will be ideally suited to allowing the visitor to jump between waking memories and sleeping memories in a relatively seamless manner.
Hey look! You’ve managed to reach the end of the entry and I’ve rewarded you with a slap. What a result!
So, the take-home here is this:
1) My blog. I am what I am.
2) Dreams are unfiltered acts of the imagination.
3) The author is honing his modelling skills using dreams as an unfiltered starting point.
4) The author, coincidentally uses ‘Dreams PS4’ software to quickly sketch-out potent imagery, then spends time in Blender 3D and Unity in order to make these artworks immersive.
5) He used the expression ‘Pocket Metaverse’ twice.
6) Batman slapped Robin in a meme which keeps on giving.
7) This entry concludes at 1,254 words
8) TL;DR
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