by Rudy Rucker
Right next to Sy Snootles is Darth Vader's costume. The cryptic alien writing on the little control panels on his chest is Hebrew. "Not many people realize that Darth Vader is Jewish," smiles Don. "Notice also that he's clean. Darth Vader and the robot C3PO are the only shiny things in the Star Wars universe. Everything else there is grungy."
We turn next to a yard-long spaceship model. "We wanted to make this the shape of an outboard motor that's been rocked up out of the water," says Don. "For the details we used a technique we call kit-bashing. We include a lot of pieces from standard model kits. See that there, it's the conning tower of a submarine, and here's the hull of a destroyer ship, and this down here is the front of a jet plane, and up here is part of a helicopter." This kit-bashed spaceship is a reality collage. The computer graphics animators scan textures from things, but the model makers break up and reassemble real objects.
"Where's R2D2?" I ask. He's always been my favorite.
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Don points, and I turn to see a whole herd of R2D2's in a far corner. There are eleven of him. Why so many? Because when Star Wars was filmed, the science of radio-controlled machines was quite primitive, and it was easier to build a different R2D2 for each of the different things he was supposed to be able to do: turn his head, roll, fall to pieces, and so on. Each R2D2 has a big "holographic projector lens" near his top. The lenses look familiar because . . . they're those movable nozzle lights that airplanes used to have over the passenger seats. "And those slots along his side are from coin-operated vending machines," Don adds. It's kit-bashing in a higher, more industrial way.
Now we come to the gilded Ark of the Covenant itself, resting beside a busted-open wood crate. Stenciled on the crate is "Eigentum des Deutsches Reich," with a swastika. I really am in the Raiders of the Lost Ark warehouse, and now, yes, Don opens a cabinet and he pulls out the matte painting of the Raiders warehouse scene, a giant sheet of glass with piles and piles of boxes fading into the painterly distances, and with an irregular trapezoid of clear glass where the image of the moving warehouseman was projected for optical compositing.
The ceiling struts in the matte painting seem to match the struts in the archive room, and when I go back outside and the foggy beauty of this hidden valley spreads out before me, it's hard for me not to believe, for a moment, that I am looking at an even huger matte painting.
And then the wind and the movement of the light remind me that this is real, this is where I live. In the mist a big bird circles on great, fingered wings, and I'm filled with joy at being alive in a world where I can dig into the details, just as I am, without a work station.
Standing there bathed in the real world's full-body sensory input, the efforts of computer reality seemed fiddling and paltry. The world has been running a massively parallel computation for billions of years, after all; how can we even dream of trying to make our machines catch up?
But we do keep pursuing the impossible dream of computer reality anyway; we keep on trying to digitally kit-bash the cosmic matte. It's one of the human race's ways of blooming - like science or like art. And in a funny way, thinking about computer realities gives you a greater appreciation for the real thing you get to walk around in.
Appeared as "Use Your Illusion: Kit-Bashing the Cosmic Matte,"
in Wired, September 1993.
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Art in Amsterdam
July 23, 1994. Van Gogh and perplexing poultry.
Ida met up with us in Amsterdam, she's in Europe herself this summer. We rode the canal bus to the museum district and hit the Van Gogh Museum right away; it was great. My favorite four pictures were from June/July 1890, right before he shot himself. If you could paint like that, how could you want to die? Maybe it was unbearable to be that great? It's tough being a great artist, yes it is. The Vincent I got into the most was one of a mansion or castle at twilight. What he does with the brushwork is to completely shape the strokes to the subject of that part of the picture. In the grass the strokes are quick parallel vertical lines. On the sunset horizon there is a stack of parallel orange strokes, a pile of light. And, ah, in the big trees the strokes are Perplexing Poultry puzzle pieces, they are like an M. C. Escher tessellation yes they are, with leaf, branch, sky, sun colors tiled in, light and dark leaves, man I have got to use this in Freeware, this is what the Perplexing Poultry philtre is for, man, to make the world look like the mature work of Vincent Van Gogh.62
As well as thinking of Vincent's brushwork in terms of the Poultry, I also, since Ida was there, thought of it in terms of a hyena tearing a piece of meat in half by whipping its head around in crazy-eights. This being a rap that Ida and I got into watching a nature show once - how a hyena that's bitten onto something big (possibly
62. The mathematician Roger Penrose has shown that the plane can be tiled in a non-repeating way with two funny-shaped tiles that he sometimes draws as a skinny chicken and a fat dodo bird. These are his "Perplexing Poultry." It used to be possible to buy puzzle-sets of Perplexing Poultry from a British company, Pentaplex, which can be found on the Web at http://www.pentaplex.com. The ordering links at this site are dead, so I'm not sure if the puzzles are still available. Perplexing Poultry also play a role in my novel Freeware, where one of the characters develops a "philtre" which is a kind of program you can use to make everything around you look as if it were made of three-dimensional Perplexing Poultry.
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Penrose's Perplexing Poultry.
even an entire ruminant), will lash its head around in a kind of figure-eight pattern to tear loose a bite of flesh. And Ida and I got into doing that to each other's shoulders, or threatening to do it, and getting into the very wild and hyper motion of your head that goes with it. We called this motion "crazy eight." So looking at Vincent's last pictures, I found my head moving around in those loops, imagining how it would be to tear into that kind of painting - if you could do it.
July 24, 1994. Edward Keinholz's Barney's Beanery.
This morning I saw the most wonderful work of art I have experienced in years. Barney's Beanery by Edward Keinholz in the modern art museum here behind the Van Gogh museum.
A dumpster, painted silver, with some slight, direct set-up instructions consisting of the circled letters A, B, and C, along with a few crooked lines, and arrows directed at holes in the substance of the dumpster, holes through which power and information were making their way.
By the door into the dumpster is a newspaper stand with head-
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line KIDS KILL KIDS: VIETNAM, dated, I believe, August 28, 1964. Inside is the model of a diner, with the Righteous Brothers singing "You've Lost that Loving Feeling," on a tape over a crackle and gabble of conversation and dishes, at first I wonder "what are they going to play next," and slowly I realize it is always the same song by the Righteous Brothers, and then, later, I realize that it is in fact always the same verse and chorus of "You've Lost that Loving Feeling." There are lots of people inside the place, it's full like a full bar/beanery late at night in August in 1964. I find my way down the diner aisle. I am light and huge, I am the ghost of Summer 1994, thirty years later than the world of Barney's Beanery.
The reason I feel big is, I realize, that all the people are about five-sixths normal size. The beer bottle on the waiter's tray at the back must be, come to think of it, a pony-size bottle, as it has a very bogus label: Lowenbrau from Zurich, Switzerland? In any case, everyone and every detail of chair bar table sign bottle plate, every detail is consistently at the same subhuman scale. About five sixths or three fourths, between that, maybe four sevenths, maybe the golden proportion, the golden Keinholz Barney's Beanery proportion long may it wave.
So I enter the Beanery and push back my way to the back, knowing Audrey will slowly follow me just as if we were invading a real Beanery. The weird thing, everybody in here has a clock for their face. Why? "You've Lost that Loving Feeling" I'm grasping that this one chorus loop is it.
On the shelf at
head level behind the bar are lettered drink specials. Towards the back is a sign saying something like "All Visitors of Barney's Beanery Must Order An Amount Exceeding 35 Cents." And pasted to the sign with scotch tape is a quarter and a dime. Running down from the coins along the wall is a ballpoint line and arrow pointing to a guy with his face down on the side on the table top, except his head seems to be a large vacuum tube. (How '60s, a head that is a vacuum tube. How 19th Century, the idea that everyone's head is a clock, a clock with hands.)
So then Audrey and I worked our way back out, sharing a tender lingering-feeling moment by the Barney's Beanery dial payphone near the door, and then Ida went in there alone real fast, emerging
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not obviously impressed, at least not impressed enough to be patient with my grandiose exegesis of Barney's Beanery.
''It's a moment in time," I told Ida. "Wouldn't it be cool if all of the people's face-clocks in there had the same time?"
"Yeah, duh," snaps Ida, "They're all set to ten-ten."
"Oh," I say, and decide I've got to go back in to check this and other details. So later after we've seen all the great stuff on the upper floor, and the women are in the card shop or hanging out in the vast building-high open spaces, I run downstairs and dart around all the wambling other tourists who are about to maybe see this work, and get alone back into the Beanery and run to the back corner where the music is the loudest and I am the farthest from the unending reality of this working life. It's the same chorus, the same emotion that wells up in me at hearing that chorus wells up again . . . and again . . . and again . . . this is my college years, this Beanery is like a great wild college drinking and diner night. It's as if while staggering around in that world Ed Keinholz had a special moment, not so much more wonderful than any other moments, but still a wonderful moment, and he like mentally photographed it so that he could reproduce it at a golden ratio of scale in a dumpster-sized box with input lines labeled A B and C for wonderfully simple '60s analog technology of power and audio.
Now I finally look sharply at the clock faces of the people and Ida is right, it's ten ten over and over for ever and ever.
Unpublished. Written July 1994.
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Pieter Bruegel's Peasant Dance
I've loved Bruegel for a long time. When I was thirteen, my parents sent me away from Kentucky to live with my grandmother for a year in Germany. She was a wonderful old woman. To teach me German, she helped me read and reread a fairy tale about a child that falls down a well and finds another world down at the bottom, an apt image for a parallel world such as, e.g., Germany relative to Kentucky. To further educate me, Grandma showed me Das Bruegel Buch, a book of Bruegel's paintings. I was particularly impressed by the apocalyptic Boschian painting The Triumph of Death, with its armies of skeletons. "This is cool," I remember thinking while looking at that picture. "This is like science fiction." I was also naively pleased with Bruegel's hundred-in-one pictures like Netherlandish Proverbs. In later years I became more fond of Bruegel's mature, non-seething paintings such as Peasant Dance. Thanks to their deep, detailed pictorial space, these paintings look into worlds that are very large.
I think of Bruegel's paintings as being like novels, so filled are they with character, incident, narrative and landscape. I feel a pang of sorrow when I stop looking at one of Bruegel's pictures, just like when I finish reading the last page of a great novel. I don't want to leave, I don't want it to be over, I want to stay in that world. How far into the world of a painting or a novel can you get?
In each, the information has a kind of fractal structure. I would define a fractal as something that has this property: when you look twice as hard at a fractal, you see three times as much. Language is fractal with words suggesting words suggesting words, while paintings are fractal with their details within details within details. A basic problem is that in either case only a limited amount of information is really being given. Fractal nature has an essentially infinite precision, but a novel or a painting is radically finite.
How finite? It depends. A significant difference between paintings and novels is that when you get a printed copy of a novel you get all of
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Peter Bruegel's Peasant Dance.
(Photo © Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna)
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the available information: all the letters of all the words of the text. But when you get a reproduction of a painting, you are settling for a degraded semblance of the original. Given that a painting is a non-digital object, it's not even clear how much information really would be needed to perfectly specify the image. This is a real problem when you want to get deeper and deeper into a detailed image such as a Bruegel.
At this stage in human technology there's no replacement for going to a museum to look at the original of some beloved masterwork - although, sadly, the very fact of being in a museum involves its own distractions, of standing in a public space watched over by museum guards, with your schedule subject to opening and closing times and your senses impinged upon by the other tourists.
Over the years I've made a point of visiting as many Bruegel paintings as possible. The world's richest trove of Bruegels is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; they hang together in a single high-ceilinged room. I well remember the sensation I get going into this divine: a feeling of great urgency. Each picture is filled with individual specific people, places and things, all presented as the most delightful visual forms: the arabesque two-dimensional curves, the sensual massings of three-dimensional shapes, and the scumbled color fields. One of my favorite paintings there is Peasant Dance.
Before going into detail about Peasant Dance, I want to add a detail about detail. I always have a certain disappointment when I get an extremely close look at a beloved painting, either by seeing it in person or by looking at a magnified view of some small section. At a certain level of enlargement, the painterly illusion goes away and all you see are brushstrokes. Blow up a small figure's face and instead of pores, you see daubs of paint. The same thing is true of novels. If, for instance, you flip through a book and carefully read all the descriptions of some one favorite character, you'll notice a certain mechanical element: certain identifier phrases and attributes occur over and over. These fictional "brushstrokes" are used by authors to give their fictional people an air of persistent existence. The seeming reality of a novel or a painting is an artful construct that only pops into focus at a certain distance. It is only the cosmic fractal of real life which allows for endless zooming.
Peasant Dance, also known as Peasant Kermis, is one of Bruegel's
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last paintings, completed a year or two before his death at about age 44 in 1569. What do we see?
A little dirt road through a village beneath a gray sky; there's leaves on some trees but it doesn't feel like summer; I'd say it's spring. Gray sky and muddy buildings, a small town. Some people dancing in the middle ground. In the foreground are two main groups, one on the left, one on the right. On the left is a bagpiper with a drunk man watching him from a few inches away. On the right, a couple is running into the canvas from outside the frame, they're late, they're hurrying, their attention is focused ahead of them on the dancers and probably on some food and drink back there to the left. The man is hard-faced and black-toothed, his run is already breaking into a bit of a dance, he has a spoon tucked into his hat. The woman he tows behind him is too busy hurrying to dance, she seems a pale-faced unlovely goose with room for but one thought at a time in her head.
I always think of Jack Kerouac when I look at the drunk man watching the bagpiper, of the On The Road passages about Jack and Neal digging jazz, "Blow man, blow!" And I cringe a bit, remembering the times I used to be like this myself: crowding up to a guitar-playing friend and fixating on his performance, "gloating over it," as Jack says in Visions of Cody, thick-tongue-edly urging the musician on, lost in the inebriate's self-centered feeling of creating ("realizing
" by observing!) the air-vibrations and the sight trails of the soundy scene around. Meanwhile the musician is playing on, his small eyes fixed on the distance, he's putting the music out there, grateful perhaps for the accolades of his drunken acolyte. After all, unheard sound is hardly music at all, any more than an unseen picture is a painting, or an unread text a novel - communication is one of art's several vital organs.