I realised that my original eight-and-a-bit thousand word end of year summary was going to be a big ask for any reader. By virtue of being a blog, one gets to talk about one’s self and given that my readership is limited, my acute awareness that attention spans only seem to extend marginally for famous people and diminish in the opposite direction for everyday people like myself, my inner editor began yelling ‘Who fucking cares?’
To be honest, that brutal part of my brain did have a point. So, my micro thesis of the surreal and horrid year that was 2020 will remain an unpublished element of my regular journal and what you get here will be something of a malnourished version of events.
Do you care?
I would have provided a month by month account of how the year went, but this seems a little unnecessary upon reflection. I’m going to reduce the ingredients down to the most salient points of how my year turned out and keep the emphasis on creative output.
I could talk about the big news stories of last year and how they did or didn’t impact on my life, but if you’re reading this, I’m sure you’ve had a belly-full of that, so we can skip Covid-19 related waffle as well.
What does this leave then?
A previous entry mentioned that I’d begun the process of making physical polaroid images of my dreams. This project has been mostly successful in terms of making my first dream photo album. In tangible, physical legacy terms, I can leave a book or several volumes of photos depicting events of things that never actually happened in the real world.
We snap away and build volumes of image data which gets stored on computers of places we went, people we encountered etc. My reasoning and justification for making a dream photo album is that I can show, using photography, all those strange places that I went between turning the light off and disappearing for seven to eight hours a night.
Obviously while I was getting on with this angle of self expression, the rest of the world was going to hell in a hand cart.
In truth, with all the depressing things going on in the news, I was experiencing a sense of my own mortality. This actually spurred a bit more effort into the ongoing process of writing memoirs, sorting and ordering old photographs into a more organised looking archive. I had (and still do) a feeling that the past and present require some kind of integrated synthesis with each other.
I’ve noticed often in life that there seems to be a negative sentiment towards ‘dwelling on the past’ because the pithy, ill-conceived ideas that make that kind of empty statement, often point out that ‘It keeps you from being in the present’. Superficially, this may seem sensible and true. I’ve learnt that it’s also a form of utter hogwash!
We human beings are drift-nets of our own accumulated experiences. I’d argue that one cannot make a single meaningful gesture without owing some form of debt to a choice made or a detail in the tapestry of previous life experiences. It seems to me that a healthier approach to living in the present is to embrace the past. This seems truer as we age. If you disagree, consider what an elderly person, has; most of their life is made up with ‘past’, there is the eternally fleeting ‘present’, there probably isn’t much ‘future’.
You let go of the past when you die, until then, It’s yours to do what you want with it. In my case, I’m trying to integrate it into the present by correcting terrible grammar, adding extra detail to poorly recorded events that my younger self failed to adequately capture at the time and so on.
It has been, so far, fairly therapeutic.
Before I conclude that little segment, I think It’s worth stating that it isn’t a good life strategy to live in and dwell on the past if all that amounts to is mentally occupying those areas with nothing to show for it. I think the process of writing and production of art/photography and graphics is a much better use of that kind of energy. It is using memory in a constructive way. We are walking histories, history isn’t anything without someone making the effort to record it.
I’m not going to talk too much about how the career in the world of construction came grinding to a virtual halt as lockdown commenced.
“But Matthias, I thought that the government said that construction wouldn’t be affected by lockdown?!”
I had to shield.
Income took a whopping bash on the nose as a consequence, but I kept active and busy at home doing other things for a few weeks. I took a look at life clutter, which involved creative clutter and decided to have a purge of things which no longer seemed to have function or purpose. Over the last few years I’d accumulated a respectable pile of electronic music making equipment which had begun to gather dust.
Without chuntering on too much about the why’s, I’ll condense it down to this: I had been making music on a daily basis until Brexit/Trump/my friend Dave’s suicide/a dying biosphere/societal divisions, but I found after these events, my output had turned quite negative sounding. Making music which reflected my mood was turning into a depressive feedback loop, so I took a big step away from it and decided to focus on other things.
I still do occasional audio, but there isn’t anything I can’t do with my laptop or iDevices if I want to, so having other gear seemed a bit redundant.
I mention this here as there was a sequence of recycling the above which had a strange, life-altering outcome.
After a determined eBay purge which happened during the early Summer, I traded music gear for new creative gear, which transpired to be the unlikely purchase of a Playstation 4 console, a PSVR headset and a system-selling bit of software called ‘Dreams’ from Media Molecule.
‘Whut?!’
OK, this does need some clarifying. I hadn’t touched games or consoles for several years. I hadn’t tried VR since 1992, however, I kept an eye on both. Gaming seemed like a time-sink which I could do well to avoid in favour of doing creative things instead. VR has had a loooong incubation period. I’ve personally been waiting around twenty-plus years to see the technology become what it is today and affordable.
Media Molecule had recently released ‘Dreams’ which, on the surface was a game but also a game creation package. Described as that, is a form of injustice. Dreams is a tool for making 3D artwork that could be ‘game-ified’ if that’s what the artist wants to do, OR, it can be a perfect toolset for generating all manner of 3D virtual expressions because it can model, it can be a highly expressive paint canvas, it can used to create music and sound design and (the clincher) It can do all of the above AND allow work to be seen in VR.
At the time I invested in the PS4/PSVR combo package, the VR functionality hadn’t been implemented but I knew that it would be a small matter of weeks away, so I just jumped right in.
VR had come a long way since my first and only experience of it in 1992.
Here’s an excerpt from my journal:
“I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d not really played any console games for several years and had more or less assumed that my gaming days were over, a thing of the past. When the PS4 arrived, I saw it as a new mode for creativity rather than a gaming machine. It could do what my new MacBook Pro can’t, so I set it and the Playstation VR headset up.
Virtual Reality functionality wasn’t part of Dreams yet, so I had downloaded a couple of demo games and made sure that a couple of complimentary titles with VR were part of my bundle. I had no idea what it would be like, but my first attempt at actual VR since about 1992 was about to happen. I loaded up ‘The Last Guardian VR’ to see how far things had come.
I was immediately impressed with the level of immersion, I appeared to be in a large cavernous, ancient building. A moment later, a giant creature which resembled a fluffy Griffin jumped down from some pedestal higher up and landed in front of me. I’d seen this creature countless times before in Youtube clips, thought it looked cool but thought little else, now it loomed like a giant over me. The creature lowered its head to be level with mine and edged a little closer as the sound of exhaled creature breath seemed to wash over me. I remember gasping in shock and instinctively moving backwards to create some distance between myself and the imaginary being.
I realised that mentally and emotionally, I was fully engaged in this moment on levels that staring at a flat screen could never achieve. I was utterly gob-smacked.
Playing this demo was terrific fun but disappointingly short. I then made a bee-line for downloading WipeoutVR, as this had always been a game which had said:
‘Excuse me, excuse me! I know I’m a funky looking futuristic combat racer, and I know the technology for me is rather limited at present, but one day, don’t you think I’d be awesome in VR?’
Well, that’s how it felt circa 1995, when I was imagining gaming of the future.
When the Wipeout demo loaded and installed, I fired it up to find that the main title screen of the game had positioned my perceptions to be standing in the middle of a Wipeout racetrack. Throbbing bass and typically Wipeout techno began rumbling away, getting louder as three ships appeared to be barrelling towards me. As they rapidly reached my position, the view from the PSVR headset went into a slow-motion bullet-time, I turned to look at the craft passing to the right of me, observing its detailed undercarriage with all its engine parts on full view. The bullet-time then ended and the racing craft disappeared down the track somewhere behind me. Once again, I was so impressed, I think my mouth had fallen open in amazement.
So, I mention this because that’s how Covid-19 provided a rare plus-side and how I became infected with the VR Bug.”
The VR bug!
I’d been so thoroughly impressed with what I’d experienced, I sold my Teenage Engineering OP-Z which I used to fund another headset, an Oculus Quest.
I only did this because my interest in what VR could be in 2020 had been ignited. Playstation VR was excellent but felt very much like being in a Sony branded ‘walled garden’. The Oculus Quest turned out to have superior optics, portability and the opportunity to try out ‘social VR’. Given that meeting with people outside of my bubble was either banned or needed a thorough risk assessment, It seemed perfectly logical to use VR as a safe method of interaction with the outside world. I created an account in something called ‘AltspaceVR’ and found a new avenue of amazement.
AltspaceVR allows people to access all manner of imaginative 3D worlds and be sociable, using the headset as a kind of 3D telephone. You design an avatar to your aesthetic sensibilities with an albeit, currently limited palette. I found on a small number of occasions, just having an explore, hearing some interesting conversation as I passed some other 3D people, I would stop, say hello and be welcomed into conversation. There might be four or five people chatting, all in the same area but in reality, distributed in different locations around the world. The fidelity of the voice audio is terrific, clearer than a phone call.
The future appeared to be happening now.
This wasn’t why I invested in the hardware though. During the Summer, I began experimenting with making VR artworks. I had remembered the late Terence McKenna positing that VR would eventually ‘turn the imagination inside out’ and would therefore be a perfect tool for artists to truly reveal their inner worlds. In 1994 this seemed tantalising but totally out of reach.
In 2020, the techno-psychedelic chickens had come home to roost!
Ideas I’d had floating around for decades suddenly found a home.
One evening during July, found myself mulling what appeared to be a massive cross-roads in my life. The pandemic was making me seriously consider where I was and how I’d got there in my career. I also considered the logical trajectory of where I had been heading. I had intended to start an NVQ level 5 in construction management. I’d fully intended to do it, but the thought of it had left me very heavy-hearted. This wasn’t something I wanted to do because I love it, it was something I was about to do because ‘I could do it’ was that enough? My heart said ‘No, not really’
I was thinking about the reinvigorated creative passion burning in my chest, the thing I just do out of the sheer joy of doing it. I’ve never needed an excuse for it, my creative mojo has always been by my side through all weathers. I had also noticed that my thinking had come full circle over the potential for VR.
Look, I know I could ramble on and on and I’m aware that this isn’t fascinating unless you’re me, so I’ll try and fill in the remaining stuff with a very abridged version of events:
- I mulled my career-crossroads and pondered’ how do I turn it all around so that I’m doing something that taps into my actual passions and still resembles a career? *
- I kid you not, a Twitter feed tweet appeared within seconds of framing that question as I happened to be sitting in front of my open laptop at the time. The tweet said that a local university was having an open day in VR the following day, for a course in Virtual and Augmented Realities.
- I attended the open day in AltspaceVR and was suitably impressed enough to apply for the course.
- I spent the next couple of months generating as much VR content as time would allow and I couldn’t have done it without the Oculus Quest.
- I had an interview in September which went very well and day after it had happened, I was offered an unconditional place on the course.
- I begin my course, which will be a masters degree in Jan 2021
Examples here of some of the imagery I rustled up for my e-portfoilo
So, upon reflection, it was good that I recycled my music making gear, it was all part of a sequence which lead to a process of error correction, as I’d regretted, and in many ways been affected by not going to university when I was younger. I hope that subsequent entries in this blog illustrate that this pivotal point in life was a decision for the better.
As for the rest of the 2020? …
I was able to return to work in a fairly limited and isolated capacity. You don’t want to hear about pointing in rubble wall vaults, I did take the Quest in my backpack, so it became fairly common practice to sit alone in a vault during break times, get food and drink out of the way, then dive into VR and create stuff for my portfolio. I used an excellent app called SculptrVR during this time. I had the same app on the PSVR but the two versions didn’t exchange files, this meant that I used the Quest as a VR sketchbook, then used the PSVR with it’s graphical advantage to do more fleshed-out works.
I’ll pop a couple of side by side examples below.
As Autumn went into full swing, I had the pleasant surprise of seeing my face pop up in the video Faito by Alka. The video had been made by my as yet un-met in reality, friend Todd, who also helped produce the excellent album Regarding the Auguries, from which the track came.
Pleasant semi-surprise number two in the same day, was hearing the track Earth Crisis (also on the album) and hearing my voice excitedly talking about ‘strange metallic noises in the sky’. Yes, I have heard the phenomenon of ‘sky trumpets’ first-hand, so can confirm that they are ‘a thing’
Alka is the artist name my other as yet un-met friend Bryan works under for his music recordings. I bought a physical copy of the album, it was an excellent listening experience from start to finish. If you’re into electronica with heart, you can’t go wrong.
During this period, I was also delighted with a little package that came through the post. I’d ordered a reproduction of my old Pepsi-style PWEI top. I’d lost the original one years ago, and I always regretted that I hadn’t bought the same design printed on black cotton. I celebrated my new/old clobber by taking a selfie which was intended to represent a kind of future echo of how I used to rock the same clothing.
Autumn shifted to winter. With the university application, the interview and acceptance of the application in the bag, I returned to noodling away at 3D artwork, for the hell of it. In truth, I’d been avoiding using Dreams as I’d found the learning curve for the software quite steep on my first attempts. Lots of attempts followed by disappointing results. I’d embraced SculptrVR instead as it was easier and then felt terribly guilty at shying away from Dreams. In November, I had a word with myself and pressed on with Dreams. What excuse did I have anyway?
Patience and practice paid off eventually, I began my efforts by making VR-ready homages to a couple of record sleeves I’d always admired.
This promptly emboldened me to begin some more challenging project ideas. If it isn’t abundantly clear from my comments regarding ‘making the past into something new’ that I mean what I say, then the following images illustrate what I’m talking about.
I’ve been into the concept of psychogeography since one of my favourite authors, Alan Moore, switched me on to the idea. His explanation is linked here for a succinct definition. I related to the definition on a deep level as it resonated with some of my creative preoccupations. I’ve held a long-standing view regarding how memories, particularly those old dusty ones which are infused with smells, music, zeitgeist’s-past, tastes, people etc, all fuse into a kind of singular, distinctive node within the framework of the mind. I also come from an era where computers and digital recording devices weren’t commonplace. As such, I have several vivid impressions of places I’ve lived in throughout my life but very little in the way of photographic evidence that I was there. It has all been kept in my mind.
Dreams has allowed me to experiment with several ideas so far, but the one which chimed the most, was to begin making a reproduction of a bedsit I occupied between early 1993 to mid 1994. The idea has been kicking around in my head for a few years now and has had several trial and error attempts. Using Dreams, I’ve had my best effort with it so far as the software has been so adept at quick and easy creation.
I’m not entirely certain that this rendition of the place will end with Dreams. I think that as technology develops and the power to create photorealism gets ever-nearer (and it will) I will inevitably try this again at some later point.
I envisage that a time will come, where If I’m in the mood to time travel, I’ll be able to virtually zip around in time to various locations that I’ve pulled out of the hat of my skull and see them like walking into a living, breathing photograph. I’d like it if I could pick a CD or record, put it on the virtual stereo and listen to the music that I was listening to when I was twenty one or whatever age I was in any given time. I’d like to look out of a window in one of these places and see a recreation of the view I remember before time came along and bulldozed the old to make way for the new.
Why not? Is the present so bloody excellent? I’m half joking, but as I will probably never own a TARDIS, it seems too much of a temptation to use memory and art as a time travelling vehicle. As VR is likely to grow exponentially as an entertainment and communications medium, I can’t rule out the possibility that one day I might say ‘Come and hang out with me this evening, yeah, we can sit in my old house from 1994 and shoot the breeze. If you like, we can go to a crazy dream I had a few nights ago that I think you might find enjoyable ‘
Why not?
Moving on. We’re almost at the end of this long and rambling entry. I think it’s shorter than the eight thousand word version. I didn’t mention family matters or very personal things. This is probably just as well. The minutiae of my personal life is not a concern for strangers and if you are a friend or family member, then chances are, you know it already.
I should probably close by adding some links to things mentioned. While I’m at it, I’ll also link to audiobooks I’d enjoyed immensely during 2020.
Alka: Regarding the Auguries here’s the Youtube link
Alka: Faito video
Todd’s page of many musical delights
PWEI new old merch here
More psychogeography from Iain Sinclair
Media Molecule’s Dreams software
Easy creativity in VR for all ages with SculptrVR
Mind Candy/Audio Books:
The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch
The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan
La Belle Sauvage by Phillip Pullman
The Ramble Book by Adam Buxton
Journalling and memoir writing would not be so enjoyable if I wasn’t using the utterly supreme Day One App, so here’s a link to that brilliant bit of software
* – I realised after posting this entry that I hadn’t actually described how one builds a new career with VR being the primary focus. I’ve got a couple of ideas which I think are strong and commercially viable. I’m afraid that’s all I wish to say at present. The degree will hopefully help figure things out from there and equip me with the skills to implement those or any new, hitherto unseen vocational options as I work towards this avenue of creative expression.