Matthew Sloly |
Portfolio CD |
crystal/slur/constellation2002 VRML multi-user virtual world, digital projecting 
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This project was the first iteration of an ongoing exploration of complementary methods for meaningfully mapping a topic of conversation with a 3D topology, but without privileging one or other as sign or signified. In this version, I used a limited set of words; “crystal”, “slur”, and “constellation”. In a grey featureless expanse floats a crystalline structure formed of 23 nested semi-transparent cubes scaling incrementally towards their centre to produce a kind of focal point in “the world” which echoes the 3D (x,y,z) grid in which the geometry that comprises the world is plotted. The layers of surfaces formed by the nested cubes suggest the possibility of an infinity of worlds within worlds, layers of meaning that extend beyond the scale of the visible, and the finitude of any given world. But this crystalline structure is deceptive. When it is approached it stands up and walks away. The volumetric deformations only serve to play up the regularity of its topological symmetry. If an avatar can move quickly maybe it can scale the cubes, catch a ride like a bird on an elephant’s back. The slugs drag little bits of scrolling text. The letters are white upon the ambiguous grey ground and overlap with each other, such that they are still legible, but due to the motion of the slugs, and despite the attentiveness of the eye, the reader will inevitably slip from one text to the other without ever reading a single passage in its entirety. This swarming behavior of these elements was achieved via rudimentary AI. Each slug for instance was attracted to another, but would evade any slug that got too close to it, the same was true of the cube, which also was attracted and repulsed by the slugs, getting up and walking away when necessary. In this way the constellation of elements remained in a constant state of flux, having a randomizing effect on the reading of the texts, such that there was an inevitable slippage between texts as one text moved in front of or behind another, but this is not a random cut-up method, in that all the referents constitute variable but related elements, and so give play to this dichotomy that animates the world, endowing it with a semblance of a voice of its own. All of this activity conspires to give the impression that this world could indeed be some kind of microcosmic ecosystem. On one level the title of the work, “crystal/slur/constellation”, is a poetic devise constituting the progression of the work via the linking together of its disparate and arbitrary elements. On the other level, it alludes to the main elements that constitute the virtual world of which it is the title. These words form and reflect the content of the world, literally, as a topology and a topic, and are poetically related in the context of the 3D elements that make up the virtual world. “Crystal” refers to the nested transparent cube, “slur” to the slug-like agents that swarm near to the cubes (the word “slug” is etymologically related to “slur”), and “constellation” refers to the shifting arrangements and interrelationships of all of the above. Starting with these three words, I then looked found as many etymological cognates for each that I could (in the Merriam Webster’s Online Dictionary), and entered these into the database, which would randomly assign a collection of them to each slug. Thus the slugs swarm round the cube, and the dictionary entries swarm round the slugs. Etymology is often concerned with the root meaning of words, even though the evolution of languages happens within geographical space, parallel to, and in proximity with, its related branches. As user communities diverge geographically, new contexts are encountered. The meaning of extant words within the finite lexicon of a language-community are extended via metaphor and the addition of prefixes and suffixes, just to name a few of the factors affecting the morphology of a word. Then through the proximity of these user communities to each other, and the inevitable convergences that such proximities assure, words are exchanged among them, so that words having a common root, but divergent meaning, come to exist side by side, in the lexicon of a given language-community. This shifting constellation of elements opens the possibility of radicalizing language, articulating both new and archaic meanings, in the sense of “to return to the roots”, which are both divergent and convergent, and in which topical coherence is emergent and self reflexive with topological variance. “World” is a context of relations, is a text, texture, and a textile (all three being etymologically related). In this sense, meaning is interwoven, is an interweaving, and is emergent from the entropic slippages between texts. The focused act of reading is simultaneously foregrounded as its posture is relaxed, the text becoming ambient, its linearity thwarted. Here text becomes texture, slipping between itself, folding and unfolding the symbolic, the formal, and the metaphoric, in a word, in a world.
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