IEEE Future Directions
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The "medium" has always been an integral component of art expression, along with the tools available. The walls of caves in the Sulawesi Islands 35,000 years ago were the canvas to artists and the plants/shells around them provided the tools to express their emotions and free their creativity.
Over the centuries and millennia we have seen humanity using different materials and different tools to create masterpieces or simple creation of their mind’s eye.
In these last few decades bits have become a powerful media to express one’s creativity. Digital photography, movies, music are all examples of that.
Now, at Google, they have experimented with virtual reality goggles to provide a novel tool to artists to express themselves in a 3D space made of bits where the limitation of physical reality no longer exist.
The results are fascinating, both for the artist and for us watching her creation.
More than that.
It becomes possible to be part of the artistic process by watching the artist as she is creating her masterpiece (which of course was possible also in the past if somebody was filming her) as well as entering in the process itself, stepping in at a certain point and do it "ourself" from than point on, or changing what has been done, substituting parts, adding / removing something. This is not part of Google experiment but to me it appears as a straightforward possibility. Unlike what happens in the world of atoms, in the world of bits you can do things without destroying the "original" you can, matter of fact, have as many originals as you want. Clearly this opens up new issues of property rights but just imagine the possibility.
Children can start expressing themselves on canvas already painted by artists and experiment by changing and doing it over and over. A whole new world of possibilities opens up. And this is what fascinates me most.
