Re: <documenta X><blast> Text from The World Generator / The

Morgan Garwood (mgarwood@inch.com)
Tue, 23 Sep 1997 12:30:51 -0400

>> Fabulous, sweetheart, it's YOU, babe!
har...

>>Bill this is wonderful.
>>Can you say something about the context, process, etc in how this list/poem
>>came to be?
>
>I began working on "The World Generator / The Engine of Desire" five years
>ago - before VRML. I had a sense of where virtual space was going and
>wanted to articulate it. I often write texts in this kind of "list" form. I
>worked with Gideon May, an exceptional programmer - presenting him with an
>elaborate plan for a new interface. We were supported by the Australian
>Film Commission. I was living in Australia for many years. Australia was a
>fantastic environment for this kind of work - many many interesting and
>talented technological artists... anyway - now the work exists. A new
>version of the "The World Generator / The Engine of Desire" will open with
>the ZKM in Karlsruhe - Oct 18th.

hahahahaha.!.. Bill, I've known you too well for too long; you are the
master trickster ! You know, your work is very pretty and indulgent, but
underneath it all I sense an intellectual incoherence... one becomes so
distracted by the method of your work that one forgets to ask what, if
anything, you are actually saying... by the way, what ARE you saying behind
this fantastic fog of combinatorial hallucinations ? I think you are our
next Leroy Neiman, darling boy !
O.K. I've got your number; how tasteless of me... but seriously, since
I've seen your work at its earlist stages when we we sorting out our
priorities, there has always been this question in my mind about you...
what is at the center, the core of your thinking ? What insight, what
vision motivates you ?
Where is your theoretical basis ?
This may in some way be tied to the question; what is the frame of your
moral imagination?
I read you list several times over, and sometimes I am struck by a
fleeting sense of beauty, this evanescent sense of the uncanny, of yes, it
doesn't make conscious sense, but there is a dream poesis in it that works
out; then again it becomes phlegmatic and labored; quantity for quantity's
sake; as if the dream that haunts you has become trapped in the labyrinth
you constructed to ensnare the minds of your audience... carcerel poetics,
sweet and tormented like a horse struggling up a steep muddy bank of a
flooded river in pouring rain... Pomeroy is dead now, stupid accident I'm
told, broke his head somehow, but the discussion continues...
I guess it's like distinguishing what made the Federico Fellini who was
capable of *La Dolce Vita* from the Felinni of the late work... what was
the soul the pierces the heart in the early vision become cardboard in the
last stuff ?

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