For this week's blog, I am going to take a look at new-media artist Aaron Koblin's collaboration piece with Google Creative Lab and Chris Milk, "3 Dreams of Black". Using WebGL in HTML 5 to create a combination of 2D animation and 3D "dreams", this web browser based work is an interactive film with the viewers capable of influencing the experience based on their mouse movement. They can use the mouse to travel in the direction they choose to explore the 3 different 3D worlds and 2D animation scenes, and generate tesselated designs and further "dreams" in the form of morphing 3D models of animals or through tesselating parts of the image. These visuals are accompanied by another collaboration: music by Danger Mouse, Danielle Luppi, and Norah Jones.
It follows 3 "dreams" as the title suggests, using film, animation and graphics rendered in real-time to offer intriguing worlds and showing off what can be done with modern web browsers. The general feeling of the piece seems to be the escape into other worlds, beginning with film from the first person perspective of a homeless man, then falling asleep and opening your eyes to an animated world, then further into a world being generated before you, with where you look spawning color into the world, and you are free to explore it.
According to the artists, this piece was designed to explore the heightened graphical possibilities in coding with HTML 5 and WebGL, which allow web browsers to produce visually spectacular displays utilizing the computers graphical processors without requiring additional software and plugins. The goal also is to be able to explore the dreams of others, utilizing an editor available "to add to the dream" (quote from main website of the piece").
This piece finds itself similar to the style of Generative/Algorithmic art (generative in the most basic sense) we did in class for our first Homework Project, as the main focus is that with a set of rules and possibilities in the code of the project, interaction with the piece gives it different itterations and realizations, almost impossible to exactly replicate. It is Digital Art though, paralled to the functions of a videogame, being a dynamic, interactive graphical experience, with the twist that it comes with a graphical editor to make landscapes for the project as well which you can share with others to experience in a similar manner.
As a piece of "art", I believe that the combination of a world which can generate and change depending on how you progress through, tied to light story elements and the idea of dreams, all linked by the music, is a very successful work. It truly is awe-inspiring visually, and conceptually, showing what can be possible in the future by making web browsers turn a computer into a practically open source videogame console or graphical rendering platform, as envisioned by the artists found in Google Creative Labs with Aaron Koblin and Chris Milk.
The piece can be found here: http://www.ro.me/
as well as on Aaron Koblin's website: http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work.html
~~~~~~~Nathaniel Hendrix
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