Graham Milton - New York AS3 Flash Development

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Artist, Existing

IDEA: An infinitely looping video of an artist, existing.

PREMISE: Time shall always pass, but in his creative statement of existence, an artist shall remain forever, untouched outside ide of time.

DETAILS: 2 digital photographs taken per minute, for the duration of 24 hours of a motionless being, sitting in a motionless world, spinning through space endlessly.

The photographs will be compiled as a time-lapse video on an infinitely repeating DVD, creating the image of an artist freed from the constraints of time.

Composition should be an expansive outdoor area, prefferably with long fields of grass, larges trees to the side, and a still body of water in the distance (to better show the changes in colour throughout the day, and to allow shadows cast by clouds to run across the ground, etc.) With this in mind, a public park should be ideal.

2 shots * 60 minutes * 24 hours = 2880 stills
2880 stills / 2 minutes / 60 seconds = 24 frames per second (for two minutes)

Sex and Transcendence

A few days before i did that Gorey illustration… I was chatting with a comic illustrator friend who was brainstorming for a new piece. She’d been asked to do something for a comic publication on love and sex (every edition is themed love and something) and we were chatting about all the things you could do without getting smutty etc.

I started wondering if you could make a visual metaphor for that wonderful transcendental sensual place you can sometimes peak into when making love, where you lose your ’self’ and only exist as ‘that kiss’ and ‘that caress of the neck’… where every movement is a statement in its own sensual language.

I started wondering if you could make some form of ‘parrallel universe’ where bodies were made of smoke? of water? of hair? I started trying to think about how i could depict that in illustrated form…

I got inspired & decided to try to roughly sketch something out, with a narrative of an older girl introducing an inexperienced boy to lovemaking.

However: I hadn’t drawn a comic in 10 nearly years - so you can see the first few panels in this sketch are a bit (i.e. really) crappy.

samantha_large.jpg
Though its just a sketch, I got a bit carried away with the detail in the last few panels, so I’ve linked to a larger version, if anyone’s interested.

NOTE
As its just a sketch and i was laying it out on the fly, the text is pretty much illegible, with boxes & arrows pointing to where i should have written it whenever i changed my mind.

The illegible text reads:

“Samantha, listen. I’ve never… uh, I’ve never been with anyone before!”

“Really? Well, lucky me. If you let me, perhaps I can take you somewhere special…
Do you trust me? Theres a place we can go to, but only if we go together”

“A place?”

“A place outside of time - outside of us. I can take you there, all you have to do is close your eyes… And listen to your heart”

hmmm, I really should have worked on the text more. Might have to revise it, if I go forward with a more polished version.

Imagine the dreamscapes we could have

I was recently shown a collection of photo realistic screen grabs from a new xbox 360 game, all along the lines of this:

And after the initial novelty of thinking “Wow, they’re pretty impressive renderings” wore off, I started wondeing WHY people feel its so important to replicate reality as we experience it so slavishly?

The more I started to think about it, the more frustrated I began to feel, as I started to imagine what we COULD be creating… So there you have the reason for this rant:

It frustrates me that game developers feel the need to imitate our reality!

They have the tools to create so many other representations of existence… and yet they stay so bewilderingly literal! It really makes me sick to my stomach to see such obvious potential wasted.

The human mind is surprisingly adaptive: Given a chance, it can recalibrate its understandings of ‘reality’ in very little time.

I’m talking about abstract playing fields, not tied down to conventionally accepted geometric, gravitational & causal norms. Dammit all - wouldn’t that make for more inspirational escapism!?

Tell me why can’t games play like dreams? Or that touch like art? We have the hardware to render whatever we like, and i KNOW we have the imagination, if only the industry wasn’t so scared of taking risks!

Imagine what gaming could look/feel like: