In the 1990s and early 2000s, experiments in computer animation by artists such as Michel Bret , Karl Sims , Nicole Stenger , Manfred Mohr , David Larcher and William Latham produced work that questioned the apparatus , the material and the processes of dimensional art and moving-image creation. The work that these artists created was about objects, and virtual sculptural entities, but it was also about space , the space and the void which their digital objects inhabited (Popper 1993). Their animations, which explored the possibilities of digital image generation, are symbolic of the technology of their time: surreal environments with imagined computer-generated landscapes and fantastic CGI creatures, invented worlds, 1 existing within the internal mechanisms of the computer, where the mode of production is grounded in and about a computational, virtual space .
It is the idea of space , setting and environment that formed a key component in the composition and narrative of many digital animation works from this period (in Bretās Automappe [1988], it is the swirling vortices and organic, amorphous backgrounds that act to contain the characters; in William Latham ās work, it is the inky blackness of the void that foregrounds his Giger-esque creations), a discrete stage within which objects, creatures and Phong-shaded 2 characters exist. These are unreal, highly imaginative terrains where strange and evocative storylines often play out against a backdrop of alien or outlandish dramatic landscapes, or at other times a simple void.
Emerging from these early works is a sense of a spatial language. A language that evolves from a syntactical difference in the separation between the 3D models, their stylistic manifestations and the environments within which the action takes placeāthe stage, the background or the surroundings. For example, Karl Sims introduces 3D CGI backgrounds (generated and existing within the computer) as a means to delimit or direct the movement of the creatures that he creates (or alternatively, as in Simsā Liquid Selves (1992), the backgrounds evolve to envelope the creatures to become new forms). From this disjunction, questions arise about relationships with space : what is the nature of the digital background? What are the constraints or possibilities of a virtual, potentially infinite, indeterminate computer-generated backspace?
Presentation of Digital
Twenty or so years later, as cinema refines its potential for pictorial illusionism, such rudimentary questions seem to have been largely neglected. Today, onscreen environments and digital panoramas employ 3D CGI as a choice of technology to credibly describe unfeasible landscapes and believable impossibilities. As cinema -goers, we can be transported to alien worlds, visit fantasy locations or become a participant in catastrophic events. The visual treatment is convincing and for a moment believable, yet we recognise the deception, understand the artifice. Perhaps visually impossible spaces have now become naturalised and the collective of spectacle and 3D CGI effects films of the 1990s, such as Twister (1996), Independence Day (1996) and Titanic (1997), has acted to desensitise our awe of incredible 3D CGI (spatial) cinema screen experiences, delegating the technical process of CGI to be absorbed into a universal cinematic language, an illusionistic device parallel to others.
Current trends seek to replace a fascination for superficial 3D CGI flat-screen experiences with productions and events that celebrate the capacity of the moving image to operate beyond the confines of the two-dimensional screen. For example, 3D Cinema , projection-mapping and VR promote an intellectual interaction and a physical/perceptual management of image space that functions within a very different dimensional domain. A growing discourse in these areas signals the emergence of new visual, spatial dictionaries, introduces alternative vocabularies where the viewer plays an increasingly active role in his or her cinematic experience. Authors such as Elsaesser , who provide a commentary on these developments, claim that digital technologies have speeded up the transition in which we participate with cinema , where it moves from a passive viewing environment to one where the boundaries and the screenās āframeā are becoming culturally reconfigured, suggesting that
When inflected phenomenologically, the window and the frame no longer stand in opposition as classical film theory argued for Bazin and Eisenstein and their respective conception of the parameters of depth and flatness, representation and figuration: now it is the lived body encountering the window/frame as a ācontainerā in which the dimensions of time and space are held that allows one to distinguish āhereā and an āIā from āthereā and āyouā. Thus, the cinema in the new digital environment both modifies the scope and re-energises with new meaning one of our key metaphors, window, frame and paradoxically the one most commonly associated with the photographic image ārealismā. (Elsaesser 2015, 200)
One key theme surfacing from a potential departure from two-dimensional viewing to multidimensional viewing is the revisiting of an interest in process, a re-evaluation of the techniques and technologies of production as well as the apparatus for generating spatial viewing experiences. This is a concept expanded by Elsaesser, who suggests a separation of process and presentation, inferring that it is the attributes instigated by both the āprocess of digital spacesā and the āpresentation of digital spacesā that can be determined as the traits of digital (visual) evolution. An idea that places 3D CGI (with its potential to form and manipulate an illusion of space ) at the forefront of such an evolution. 3
Space and Cultural Psyche
Alongside a practical, visual understanding of digital space and 3D CGI is the development of a philosophical model of digital space , the idea of a ācommonā digital language, or the emergence of a ācentralā vocabulary, where infused within contemporary discourse is the notion of objects in space , a conceptual digital space within which ideas and images are generated, arranged, formed and potentially presented (including 3D CGI ). Such a concept points towards (or is perhaps indicative of) an emerging digital ontology, a total environment and a common spatial vocabulary 4 within which all digital media fit and radiate from.
Some scholars, including Lev Manovich , maintain that such a conceptual shift in the way in which we imagine space (as a digital phenomenon) has already taken place, and that this is evident in the way in which we operate and conceive of visual media. For Manovich, such a position is inspired by the introduction of 3D CGI and processes of digital compositing, ā[ā¦] the way 3D computer animation organizes visual dataāas objects positioned in a Cartesian space ābecame the way to work with all moving image mediaā 5 (Manovich 2013, 294).
If an āobjectivityā of media has infiltrated our appreciation and consumption of the moving image, it has similarly dominated the way in which we construct high-level composited worlds (such as video games or 3D stereoscopic cinema ), as well as our management, interactions and engagement with these formats as mainstream media: ideas that signal a dependence on spatial environments (and 3D CGI ). Moreove...