Mark Baldridge
20200219
Rowan University
THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF PEOPLE IN THE WORLD: Those who think there are only two kinds and those who think it might be a little more complicated than that
I grew up among shape note singers and learned acapella harmony at my mother's knee
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--ZVUcDl1skE/WbvSR7JtVNI/AAAAAAAA8fA/AM17yag-fBAXY0EQevwk3epsrr35TiBVwCLcBGAs/s1600/shape%2Bnotes.jpg
I learned that there were four vocal parts: Soprano - Alto - Tenor - Bass
But the gaps between were also filled with intermediate parts: There exist Mezzo Sopranos, for instance, while I sing Baritone
(SINGING)
Besides the quanta of pitch, I learned music also organizes time into discrete packets -often of threes or of fours: -and each of these has its own flavor: Waltzes - Marches
(COUNTING)
As a youth, then, I discovered that music arranged everything, even people, into categories
What I didn't understand, what was poorly understood, was context: Only context made sense of these categories and they only made sense in that particular context
Polyrhythmy and microtuning I explored as cofounder and Creative Director of HOWLOOSEANATION, my performance "heptet"- more than 15 years of onstage antix -composing for PBS, playing the Montreal Fringe; Burning Man (first in 1998)
http://netnebraska.org/interactive-multimedia/culture/torn-notebook
And in this context I understood that 3/4 waltz time and 4/4 marching time meet in 12/4 time -their lowest common denominator -In this context they are one, not distinct
(COUNTING) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
And so I ask myself:
If we can pancake distinctions by developing contexts...
If by adding a dimension to our context we observe the merging of categories...
What do we mean by "cross-discipline" work?
When I consider building immersive environments, I might think of two different "pipelines" of production:
In a digitally immersive project, disciplines might include: Character Design - Environment Design - Story Design - Interaction Design - Sound Design
The work might be considered interdisciplinary by virtue of the spaces between those disciplines...
I worked, in this way, with teammates, to produce Synthecology -large scale, globally networked VR for the CAVE environment
http://bcchang.com/synthecology/
This is ideal for the development of small-world experiences and I worked this way in developing my ChiSky environment (and master's thesis project) and it may yet remain the largest single-creator experience ever developed for the CAVE environment
I did this by literally moving into my studio and working night and day
https://youtu.be/GcgcR5SFklk?t=12
Serving as your own "chief cook and bottle washer" -doing all the design jobs yourself- makes the team approach seem just slitghtly less cross-discipliny -involving what appears rather to be a sphere of discipline than a set of distinct disciplines that need crossing
Further:
-
My puppet work, performative, interactive, increasingly digital, bears this out: Video projection mapping, motion tracking, running interactions between objects in WebVR and people on the street...
http://www.interactimation.com/colossalheads.html -
Medium sized events with thousands of interactive participants? With other members of the Chicago Composers Forum, I helped brand and manage an installation of John Cage's Musicircus at the MCA...
http://www.encroach.net/info/show_docs/pages_2005/musicircus.html
The distinction between digital and physical immersion pancakes
They merge, in a higher dimension
If I consider the discipline-sphere of immersive environments as a whole, on this side of the divide, then the discipline I want to cross with, on the other side of a deeper divide, might fall well outside of "design" at all -within, say, the sciences:
Physics: Envision quantum states
Medicine: Explore microscopy
Cognitive science...
Focus on perception at the most fundamental level; the mechanisms by which we perceive. Turn to what we may consider illustrative failures of the perceptual apparatus:
VR, XR -the whole R soup- exploits such failures, and we are not the only species so prone: It's been recently shown that cuttlefish rely -at least in part- on stereopsis for depth perception. Anaglyphic (red/blue) 3D glasses work on them -just as on us
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-1aszCeQ4U
- Consider designing immersive environments for cuttlefish, encourage them to interact
- I'd like to know if they -like some birds- can count, and how high
- I'd like to know their opinions
If we can discover visual stimuli that trick or otherwise befuddle, we can shine a laserlike light on the evolution of the perceptual apparatus - we've known about such things for a long time and call them Optical Illusions
I've been working with Dr. Paul Schulman, Professor Emeritus in Psychology for more than a year on research testing the limits of perception, the glitches, in virtual space - here' the famous Duncker Illusion
https://tubular-contexts-05.glitch.me/
And we're now moving into categories never before seen, objects which can only exist virtually - dimensionless surfaces and "one-sided" objects...
...and we're accomplishing this with new tools which make immersive prototyping quick and easy
Here's some student work from a course in Interactive Texts I just concluded at SUNY Polytechnic where I'm rounding out a two-year contract (previously I lived and worked in Korea, and Mexico - but that's another story for another day) https://tubular-contexts-05.glitch.me/
We're seeing some of those "one sided" objects here: a Torus (donut) with two internal spheres intersects a plane
A crumpled paper texture is applied to all surfaces but the 3D objects are interiors only, with no visible exterior
Throw in some lighting and more than 1500 texts (composed by 16 students over a hundred days) and the code -generated by students with no previous coding experience- looks like this:
https://glitch.com/~and-now-this
Simple, declarative (HTML-based) WebVR running on all browsers and platform agnostic is a breakthrough, and allows for the rapid development of work which is more personal, smaller scale and makes no attempt to "fool the eye"
https://space-butterfly-v-void-moth.glitch.me/
In a STEAM program for ages 12 and up, some surprising developments are possible among kids new to coding:
https://surprising-fallout.glitch.me/
New tools, new techniques lower the bar for immersion, which has come a long way from the walk-in scale of the CAVE and now runs on the web, on all web-enabled headsets (all the current crop) as well as on laptops and mobile devices
Immersion is easy to share, quick to develop, has become personal and expressive - and simultaneously its applications are expanding in all fields of endeavor where visualization and immersion can shed any
Professionally, artistically and technologically, the field of immersion is exploding...
I offer one final example:
As you may have guessed, I've been in jobsearch since October and I've been through that ringer before -as a visiting or "foreign" professor I've sought new contracts and new experiences in new places Today I seek a home, where I can put down roots in (for preference) a new or developing program where I and my ideas about my mediam can grow
And I've never seen more teaching gigs aligned to immersive media Jobs which, two years ago were Graphic Design (while they may still share that title) are now "interactive animation, immersion, VR" treaching jobs-
And if the notoriously hidebound and slow-to-change world of academia is shifting in this direction, collapsing these distinctions, it can only be because the context of the times has permenently expanded