Published in Eurographics UK, De Montfort University conference proceedings, Washington, Brussels, Tokyo: IEEE Computer Society, ISBN 0-7695-1518-5

5,477 words

Abstract

The computer has made a whole range of new visual art forms possible. This paper describes the thinking behind the Virtual Visions project, which pursues a relatively untrodden sub-form within the digital art genres – 3D still imaging for digital print. It is also an argument for the inclusion of science as a theoretical framework from which to pursue art, as an alternative or addition to contemporary cultural and media theory. The paper introduces some of the philosophical and art-theoretical implications of an artform that is predicated on computer graphics technologies, showing how an artist who is also a graphics programmer can bring together such different intellectual disciplines. The paper ends with a request for the computer graphics community to collaborate on this project in which there are many interfacing and aesthetic innovations.

Keywords

Digital Art, 3D Computer Graphics, light and space, physics, metaphysics, Digital Art Museum.

Introduction

In a recent article I introduced the idea of the ‘new metaphysics’ to identify the speculative writings of scientists on the possible meaning of their work, meanings that the science itself cannot deal with [1]. In another article I have dealt with some of the scientific and metaphysical questions relating to dimensionality, and specifically the question why artists in the 20^th century have moved away from 3D representations, coming at a time when 3D computer imaging software has become so powerful [2]. This paper continues with some of these themes, focusing on the physics and metaphysics of light, and to a lesser extent, space. It is shown how these inform the imagery of the Virtual Visions series.

RaySculpt

Virtual Visions is a digital print series produced entirely with software developed by the artist. The software is called RaySculpt and at the heart of it is a ray-tracer, the source code for which was originally donated by media artist and colleague, Dr Richard Wright. The ray-tracer has been expanded in its functionality and adapted to render the virtual objects generated by the modelling part of the programme, originally called ‘Sculptor’, and the subject of a Leonardo paper in 1991 [3]. While writing computer programmes were essential to the early development of computer art from 1956 onwards (the inception of Franke and Laposky’s pioneering work), it has become rarer in recent years [4]. There are two reasons for this: firstly so much good software has become available for the kind of desk-top machines that artists can now afford, and secondly it has become a much bigger task to write software that can handle the complexity or functionality now demanded in the digital arts.

The generation of 3D imagery is a balance between ‘faking it’ (technically known as empirical methods in computer graphics) and using the laws of physics, or to be precise, the laws of optics [5]. RaySculpt uses a mixture as do all 3D programmes, but in using ray-tracing it leans more towards physics. The technique involves working backwards from a point on the picture, tracing an imaginary ray through virtual space to find what surfaces it encounters and what illumination is present there. If the surface is partially reflective or transparent new rays are generated, and their results added in. The advantage of this process is that it provides a direct way for the artist to manipulate light, the disadvantage being that it is slow to make progress: programming time eats into artistic time.

RaySculpt as a personal artistic tool has also enabled the inclusion of many interfacing innovations, described in earlier papers [6] and [7]. Large software developers rarely have access to artists with a training in graphics programming and user interface design, so even if the beta-testers are artists, they can rarely articulate issues around the user interface, such as navigation, moding-in, prompting, feedback, tracking symbols, kinaesthetics and so on.

We can say that Virtual Visions is predicated on the use of the physics of light and space as embodied in the RaySculpt programme, but not so obvious is how metaphysics is involved.

Physics and Metaphysics

One way to describe how the thinking behind Virtual Visions has come to focus on physics and metaphysics is to list the areas that the work does not engage with, which could broadly be named as the social and the polemic. This makes the work have a resonance with science rather than art, though while Max Planck (founding father of quantum theory) was explicit about the dehumanising goals of his work, most scientists don’t quite put it that way. Planck wanted a science that transcended human intuition, often saying that his criteria for it would be that a Martian would recognise it. He likewise enthusiastically embraced the new theories of relativity for the very reasons that many rejected it (Cardinal O’Connell of Boston for example warned all good Catholics that relativity was a "befogged speculation producing universal doubt about God and his creation") [8]. The fact is that the history of science is the history of the counter-intuitive. We don’t perceive the earth to be round and moving; we are not aware that gravitational pull diminishes with distance; and most laypersons would not immediately guess the relationship between the amplitude of swing of a pendulum and the time it takes to complete it (one of the cornerstones of early scientific investigation). And these are merely examples of the ‘old’ physics that relativity and quantum theory have so dramatically refined – the paradoxes of the new physics are orders of magnitude more counter-intuitive.

Having made these introductory remarks it is important to balance them with an argument for Virtual Visions as art at all. Whether successfully or not, the project does deal with something very human (though not social or polemic) which is the emotional response to space and light. It could be argued that in Turner’s later work he was also interested in subtracting out the human, that is the narrative, relational and political side of our natures, and focused instead on more elemental human experience. In Virtual Visions the emotional response to space and light is evoked by relatively abstract landscapes, sometimes reminiscent of organic structures, and sometimes of man-made structures, for example an oil refinery. In which case how can the physics of space and light support and illuminate this effort? The answer is in the word ‘paradox’ already mentioned. Science itself throws up paradoxes (literally a contradiction) but by the very nature of its methods can say nothing about their significance. The ability to work constructively with a paradox is more the realm of art, and also, though controversially, the realm of metaphysics.

Metaphysics has a long history since the term was introduced to describe that section of Aristotle’s work that was catalogued after his ‘physics’ (placed in quotes because it was largely a pre-scientific physics). Plato’s work is regarded as metaphysical because he believed that ‘ideas’ came first and that the physical was an inevitably poor instantiation of the idea. It is generally supposed that metaphysics ran a long course from Plato to Kant, after which its credibility declined. I have argued that a ‘new’ metaphysics has risen in the late 20^th century which is a speculative tradition partly based on the ‘new’ physics (relativity and quantum theory have already been mentioned, but chaos theory needs to be included in this category). Furthermore this new metaphysics is broadly polarised into two camps: the reductionist and the anthropic. Either way I am suggesting a more literal use of the ancient term metaphysics – simply a discourse based on the potential meaning of new scientific discovery, an investigation that science itself rules out of its scope of enquiry. The reductionist metaphysics mainly uses the science of evolution to argue the materialist corner, while the anthropic metaphysics uses the ‘new’ science to argue for a human-centred or even mystical worldview. Briefly, the anthropic argument, developed by scientists John Barrow and Frank Tipler, shows that the universe is so finely-tuned in its fundamental structure that there must be a significance in it for human existence [9]. Others draw on parallels between physics and mysticism to argue for the same significance [10] [11].

Stelarc, the great performance artist and exemplar of highly intimate man-machine relationships, once stated that he did not want his work ‘loaded with an out-of-date metaphysics,’ perhaps a response to those who saw a spiritual dimension to his work. This is a fair protestation, as the metaphysics from Plato to Kant would indeed be an inappropriate framework from which to view Stelarc. But how about an up-to-date metaphysics? The new metaphysics has much to say about our relationship with the physical stuff of the universe.

The Physics of Light and Space

So what are the central paradoxes of light and space which underpin the focus of the Virtual Visions imagery? Do they lie in the highly mathematical and abstruse developments of the ‘new’ physics? Partly, is the answer, but the surprising fact about one of the chief paradoxes of quantum theory (that light has both a wave and a particle nature) is that it has its origins in the seventeenth century. In fact light was as crucial to the very origins of science as we know it, as it is to the most recent developments of quantum theory and beyond, into superstrings. Richard Tarnas in his ‘Passion of the Western Mind’ [12] cites the ‘problem of the planets’ as being the central question that hung over the mind of intellectuals in Europe and the Islamic world for over two thousand years after the time of Plato. The very word ‘planet’ comes from the Greek ‘to wander’, and gives the clue as to the puzzle they posed to the minds of antiquity. Other points of light in the sky seemed to move with a regularity that spoke of a divine order to the universe, but the planets’ movements were uneasily erratic. A rather ad hoc system, named after the 2^nd century astronomer Ptolemy, gave some explanation, but new observations required the system to adapt to them, an intellectually unsatisfactory situation. In practical terms the Ptolemeic system failed late medieval society in its quest for a reliable calendar.

It is hard to find a panorama more convincing of the profundity of space and light, than the vista of a starry night away from light pollution, an experience sadly denied to most people today. Because contemporary life has removed us from this experience it can be hard to identify with Tarnas’s proposition that the problem of the planets was so alive to the ancients. Just one example may help however, that of Saint Augustine. After a profligate youth he turned to religion, choosing from the rival claims of Christianity, Neoplatonism and Manicheism the latter religion, and became a devoted follower of Manes for about ten years. He eventually left the religion partly because a Manichean bishop called Faustus failed to satisfy him on matters of astronomy, matters which could only have been related to the erratic motion of the planets [13]. After a flirtation with Neoplatonism Augustine settled on Christianity, and wrote some of the most influential books that were to determine the evolution of this fledgling religion. Augustine set the tone for an inward-looking, devotional and anti-empirical religious worldview.

By one of the many ironies of history, Augustine’s anti-empirical teachings led the Church through its scholastic period, a scholarly effort that stretched to breaking point the intellectual energies of the priesthood against the strictures forbidding a direct inquiry into Nature. By the seventeenth century the Church, in its established and confident jurisdiction over all aspects of European life, was more relaxed and had encouraged Copernicus and Galileo in their astronomical research in order to refine the clumsy calendar that the Ptolomeic system had bequeathed them. By another irony of history, the Church would probably have absorbed the new ideas were it not for the Reformation which saw the Protestant ideal arise of literal interpretation of the Bible. This was a disaster for the intellectual development of the West, and, famously, the Catholic reaction, or counter-Reformation, took Galileo down as a heretic as it reacted by retreating from its relative liberalism to the literalism of its enemies.

So what were these new ideas, that, coupled with a chance religious upheaval, caused Galileo to spend his last years under effective house arrest? It was the counter-intuitive notion that the Earth moved as it rotated around the Sun. This was the idea of Copernicus, but it was Galileo’s scientific observations that made the idea more compelling, and therefore more dangerous. Galileo was taking advantage of the newly invented telescope, but much more than that, he had an instinctive attraction to the idea of systematically recording his measurements. The basis of this new empiricism was laid down by Leonardo da Vinci some 150 years previous, and raised to the level of a philosophy by Roger Bacon.

But the problem of the planets took at least half a dozen men of genius to solve, the final credit going to Sir Isaac Newton. Many factors were involved in what can be seen as one of the greatest pieces of detective work practised on the natural world, and one of these was the development of the humble telescope. As one of the first scientific instruments it is highly significant that it was the tool whereby space was explored using light. The human process involved epitomises the scientific process – a narrowing down of the gaze to allow it to penetrate the physical structure of our shared universe. It is painful! Imagine a cloudless summer night in the seventeenth century, where one may stroll out to a nearby meadow and lean on a gate observing the heavens. The dark-adapted eyes are physically relaxed, and the mind is mentally relaxed and receptive to the mass of light above, and one is free to roam in one’s gaze and one’s thoughts. The pleasure such a moment can bring is rarely forgotten. But when we introduce the telescope everything changes. One eye is shut, and the other squints through the lens, the arm aches through supporting the instrument, and the mind becomes narrowed just as the eye is. The reward for the practitioner of this art is a view that is penetrating but claustrophobic, a view that leads to knowledge but also to alienation. In a sense humanity lost its innocence by peering through the lens, firstly of the telescope, and secondly of the microscope.

The telescope focuses light in order to explore space. Its use gradually destroyed the intuitions of an age, starting with the Ptolemeic idea of the fixed earth around which the heavenly bodies moved. This ‘intuition’ was embedded in the medieval mind more by Dante in his Divine Comedy (according to Tarnas) than by the arcane complexities of Ptolemy, and so the idea that the earth revolved around the sun (the heliocentric theory) was shocking indeed. So was Galileo’s discovery that there were more than seven heavenly bodies, as he identified new planets. Shocking too were the discovery of sunspots and Jupiter's moons. We find laughable that Galileo’s critics refused to look through the telescope, regarding the simple tube-mounted pair of lenses with suspicion, but in practice the instrument is an assault on the senses as much as its results are on the intellect. But the momentum of scientific discovery was now unstoppable, and the publication of Newton’s Principia demonstrated that the problem of the planets, a two-thousand year old conundrum, was exposed as an artefact of a simple spatial arrangement and a monstrously powerful yet simple idea: the inverse square law of gravitation.

Imagine a bare spherical light bulb hanging in a large warehouse. At four feet away we record a certain intensity of light, while at eight feet that intensity drops to a quarter; at twelve feet it is a ninth. The tail-off is inversely proportional to the square of the distance for the simple reason that the light flux emitted from the bulb is spread out over the area of a spherical surface as we progress from its centre. And the area of a sphere is proportional to the square of its radius, as the ancient Greeks knew. Likewise, gravitational attraction falls off with the square of distance, and when we plug in the values of distance, mass, and orbital period we obtain a mathematical model of planetary motion that is breathtakingly powerful in its ability to predict movement and absorb new data. The inverse-square law alone is not sufficient to make these calculations, but is at the heart of the solution. It also encapsulates in a simple way the very nature of three-dimensional space, as its application to fluxes of all kind shows, including light bulbs, gravitation, and electrostatics.

Let us return to our cloudless summer night in the seventeenth century, choosing 1675 to be more specific. We imagine a yeoman, uneducated but intelligent, through some inner prompting declining any further ale or conversation in his Greenwich hostelry and making his way home up Greenwich hill. The starlight is sufficient to illuminate a close-nibbled and dung-free patch of grass with a view over the Thames, and on impulse he flings himself on it, turns, and looks up at the night sky. He places one hand under his head and the other on his knife out of habit. But he is not afraid, and after a while becomes thoughtful as the immensity of the bright star clusters fills his consciousness. Unlike most citizens of today he would have had a working knowledge of the constellations, the major planets and the particularly bright stars. But his intellectual equipment does not go much further than that, though it might include a dim hand-me-down of the cosmology of Dante. His response is not intellectual, neither is it devout nor romantic. It is visceral. Lying there for several hours he does not feel in the least diminished by the immensity above him, rather he is re-connected with the cosmos and feels only the pleasure of the moment, a nameless expansiveness.

A few hundred yards from him labours John Flamsteed, the just-appointed Astronomer Royal, also looking at the heavens. He is squinting through the eyepiece of the telescope installed in the Greenwich Observatory, built by Wren, and funded by Charles II at the behest of Sir Isaac Newton. Flamsteed is supplying the data that Newton demands of him without explanation, and which will lead to his monumental work on astronomy, including the inverse square law. Flamsteed is narrowed-down, focused, tense, having given up the whole for the part. But he is aware of his role in a drama that results in the biggest intellectual expansion known in history, the scientific revolution. Where the yoeman is reconnected, Flamsteed and his inheritors are alienated, but both through the medium of space and light.

We can now turn to the first scientific paradox in the history of light. While light and its first instrument, the telescope, effectively gave birth to science, that birth included something which should have had no place in the breathtakingly rational landscape that was unfolding. At first the nature of light was simply a matter of dispute: Newton considered it ‘corpuscular’ in nature, while his eminent contemporary Huygens thought it to be a wave. By the end of the nineteenth century Huygens’ theory had won the day, or so it was thought. But the work of Max Planck, mentioned above, suggested that Newton was right after all, though in a most bizarre way. The worm in Newton’s rational apple now makes an appearance, though it had been at the heart of the matter all along.

But first we pay a visit to the squinting eyes of A.A.Michelson and E.W.Morely in 1887. They were peering, not through the eyepiece of a telescope, but through the eyepiece of the interferometer designed by Michelson, and which bears his name. Like Flamsteed their results awaited the interpretation by one of the few household names in physics, this time Einstein rather than Newton. Remarkably their instrument gave the result, as closely as they could ascertain, of precisely nothing – the most famous null-result in physics, and one which revealed a paradox concerning light far beyond the wave/corpuscle divide. The instrument revealed that the speed of light in a vacuum was constant, regardless of the relative motion of the observer towards or away from the light source. This was not just counter-intuitive, but a scientific and physical absurdity.

Imagine a continuous stream of ping-pong balls shot out of a tube as representing a light source. Imagine that they travel at one meter per second, as measured by a stationary observer. If the observer now travelled towards the source of the balls at an additional one meter per second, the recorded speed would double, at two meters per second. If the observer travelled away from the source at one meter per second the balls could never catch up, and so a relative velocity of zero would be recorded. This simple analogy holds for all wave systems so far investigated by science, including water and sound waves. But not for light. The whole of physics had to be restructured to absorb this new finding, and that restructuring, by Albert Einstein, now goes under the name of relativity.

By the end of the nineteenth century the scientific method was well-established and did not always involve squinting through eyepieces, though large sections of the chemical and biological sciences were progressed through the use of the microscope. The unaided eye could also narrow down its gaze, and it was precisely this process that led Darwin, after his fieldwork in the Galapagos, to propose his theory of evolution, a scientific idea that would challenge society’s view of itself as profoundly as the heliocentric theory.

Let us conclude this brief history of science by returning to Plank’s establishment of quantum theory, involving yet again an instrument derived from the telescope, the spectrometer. This instrument is used to investigate light itself, by splitting its components into the familiar rainbow spectrum, viewed traditionally by squinting yet again through the eyepiece of an adapted telescope. This is the spectrum from white light, and the interpretations of it led to Goethe’s famous arguments against Newton in the field of colour theory [14]. But the instrument showed a puzzling phenomenon with light from incandescent gases – a series of bright lines, known as spectral lines. Sunlight, on closer examination, shows complementary dark lines overlaid on the familiar rainbow spectrum. The solution to this conundrum was found by postulating that the electron was permitted only discrete energy-level changes in the atom, resulting in packets of light with fixed energies, or quanta. Einstein’s photoelectric theory tied in with this, and quantum theory was born, a theory that once and for all told us that light was carried by particles, now known as photons. But Huygens wave theory had been given a mathematical basis by Maxwell, and science was now left with two theories of light. Light was both a wave and a particle, a situation that was paradoxical. As was the fixed velocity of light.

Quantum theory soon turned up additional paradoxes however, the most acute of which was the indeterminacy principle, postulated by Werner Heisenberg. This was the first principle in physics that stated the limits of our knowledge of the physical world, though limited to the sub-atomic realm. Put simply we cannot make precise measurements about quantum particles because there is no quantum of energy small enough in this realm to prevent the observation of a particle changing its state. If we could only investigate the position and movement of a billiard ball by bouncing other billiard balls off it, we would have the same problem. We can use the emitted light from a star to study its nature because the star is so massive in proportion to the photons used in observation, but once a subatomic particle has emitted a photon it is irrevocably changed.

Metaphysics

So much for the physics. Its aftermath is another matter. We could sum up the impact on our intellectual landscape as two painful revolutions and an immense absurdity. The first painful revolution was the heliocentric theory, an idea that destroyed the concept of man at the centre of the universe. The second painful revolution was Darwinism, which destroyed the idea of the human being as divinely created. These revolutions, separated by two hundred years, created the one-two knockout punch to the old order, and created in the human spirit an alienation from the ancient worldview that was profound. The heliocentric theory made the human spirit seem insignificant, so, lying on the grass of a summer night now made the stars tell us a new story, one that made us small and alienated. Flamsteed’s work that hot night had opened up a rationalist vista of extraordinary breadth and beauty, while closing down another. And Darwin, to his own perplexity, brought the clockwork machine of the cosmos down to the level of our own bodies, apparently the end product of mechanical struggle for survival.

Relativity and quantum theory changed science itself, and those intellectual repercussions have nowhere been felt more loudly than in the new metaphysics. Some argue that the new physics restores us to the pre-Newtonian anthropocentricism of the ancient world, others that no meaning can be extracted from it at all. This division is presented in the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. This interpretation was championed by Niels Bohr, whose institute in Copenhagen was at the forefront of quantum research, and says in principle that quantum mechanics was a mathematical description whose reality could not be approached in any other way. There was no human faculty, comparable to gazing at a star, which allowed us to understand what the reality was that quantum mechanics described. This principle was put forward at the 1927 Solvay conference, which gathered together the luminaries of the field, including Einstein, who opposed it.

In 1952 Heisenberg found himself again in Copenhagen with Neils Bohr, and their conversation took them back to the historic interpretation made in that city. Bohr had previously addressed members of the Vienna Circle, philosophers who founded the positivist movement, and had been baffled by their unquestioning acceptance of quantum theory and its radical implications. Heisenberg pointed out that the positivists would have no difficulty with the Copenhagen interpretation because of their reliance on data and rejection of metaphysics. If the data is such and such, it is of no interest that their implications or meaning may be shattering. Bohr then responded that the positivists were content to use the terms metalogic and metamathematics, but metaphysics was anathema. "The prefix, after all, merely suggests that we are asking further questions, i.e. questions bearing on the fundamental concepts of a particular discipline, and why ever should we not be able to ask such questions in physics?" [15]

It is in this sense that the term metaphysics is being used here, and in this sense that it is being recommended as a useful theoretical adjunct to digital culture. With hindsight we might say that the 17^th century read too much into the theories of Newton, and that the 19^th century read too much into the theories of Darwin, a hindsight that is made possible by the more fluid readings we are forced to make of the new physics. For many, including the positivists, metaphysics implied a religious overtone, and was therefore to be rejected. Stephen Jay Gould, concerned that religious creationists in the US are muddying the divide between science and religion, has made an impassioned argument for maintaining the separation. He calls this principle ‘NOMA’, short for Non-Overlapping Magisteria [16]. In effect this is a simplified version of a principle already put forward by Ken Wilber in his argument for ‘epistemological pluralism’ [17], though Wilber is stating this more in the context of the new physics, as discussed here, whereas Gould’s arguments are related to the debates still raging around Darwinism. Both accept that a synthesis of science and religion is unworkable and undesirable, Gould going further and rejecting the anthropic metaphysics of Tipler and Barrow. But neither explore the one area of contemporary discourse that is free to roam across science, metaphysics and religion (or any other it chooses) – that of art.

Virtual Visions – An Example

Any theoretical framework must be distinguished from the artworks that are produced in its sway. Once a certain theoretical structure has coalesced in an artist’s mind the production of the artwork then takes them into a realm which has its own dynamics, the art itself. This is by way of saying that Virtual Visions, like most artistic endeavours, is not meant to be a slavish adjunct to a philosophy. Nevertheless we can examine one piece from the series and trace how the physics and metaphysics of light and space inform it. The image shown in Fig. 1 was originally conceived as a part of a study in alienation, the large sphere representing the unity of an individual half-trapped by a protective cage of some kind, and located underneath a representation of the earliest form of computer memory. The two obscure figures to the right, one dark, and the other light, have shapes reminiscent of one of the electron orbitals of quantum theory. In the background a ripple of light and dark has been generated using the inverse-square law and represents the force field between two masses or electric charges. Virtual light sources pump out illumination that is multiply reflected and refracted off and through the surfaces in the scene, tracing out the bare three dimensions open to human perception. The fourth dimension, time, is present by its absence, as a slice through the Einsteinian block universe, where all events are trapped in their location by the four space-time coordinates. Both the visceral type of response of our imaginary 17^th century yeoman and the intellectual type of probings of Flamsteed are invoked by the artist’s receptivity to the impact of space and light, and form the core inspiration for this piece and entire series [18].

Fig.1 vv_017a, taken from the Virtual Visions series

The kind of artistic considerations employed within the Virtual Visions series are unique to myself as an artist, but also have things in common with other 3D computer artists such as Tony Robbin, David Em, and William Latham. More broadly, there are algorithmic elements within the Virtual Visions series, such as in the procedural backgrounds and textures, which have artistic motivations in common with a much wider range of computer artists. A recent involvement with a project called Digital Art Museum, an online archive of computer artists since 1956, [19] has provided me with a better understanding of how algorithmic art using computer graphics has developed, and how it has roots in the modern art movement of Constructivism. In turn the Constructivists, such as Russian-born Naom Gabo, turn out to have metaphysical interests which resonate with those outlined in this paper.

Conclusions

Digital culture is susceptible to the error that all innovative fields are prone to, that of defining itself as other to what went before, or other to disjoint fields of human endeavour. Science, the history of science, and in particular the ‘new metaphysics’ (the speculative writings by scientists for the lay public on the possible meanings of their discoveries), can all play a role in digital art, as has been demonstrated here in Virtual Visions. Popular science is on the best-seller list, reviewed in the Sunday papers and found on the airport bookstall, but there is no natural route whereby it is introduced to the art or electronic art curriculum in colleges. One of the few books about science that arts and humanities students have been exposed to over the last decades is Khun’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions [20], but this has had the unfortunate effect of encouraging a disengagement with science. I would like to encourage a real engagement with science, conscious of the effort that it requires, but also aware of how rewarding it is and how digital culture can be enriched by it. After all if the challenging and mysterious properties of light had not led us to the quantum, there would be no digital computer and no digital culture. Finally I would like to extend an invitation to the computer graphics community to participate in the Virtual Visions project. As a test-bed for graphics routines with specifically artistic and aesthetic outcomes, and for user interface design in arts packages, RaySculpt has much to offer.

Acknowledgements

The Virtual Visions and Digital Art Museum projects are both funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board of Great Britain.

References

[1] King, Mike, 'The New Metaphysics and the Deep Structure of Creativity and Cognition' in Creativity and Cognition, in Candy, Linda and Edmonds, Ernest (Eds.), Creativity and Cognition 1999, Proceedings of the 3^rd Creativity and Cognition Conference, Loughborough University, New York: ACM Press 1999, pp. 93 - 100

[2] King, Mike, ‘The Tyranny and Liberation of ThreeSpace - A Journey by Ray Tracer’ in Digital Creativity, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1999, Swets and Zeitlinger, pp. 215 – 227

[3] King, Mike, 'Sculptor - A 3D Computer Sculpting System', Leonardo, Vol 24, No. 4, 1991, pp. 383 – 387

[4] King, Mike, 'Programmed Graphics in Computer Art and Animation, Leonardo Vol 28, No.2, 1995, pp. 113-121

[5] King, Mike, 'Virtual Reality: Give Us a Visual Clue' in Proceedings of the First Split Screen Conference, July 1996, Chicester Institute of Higher Education, pp 180-187, 1997

[6] King, Mike, 'Manipulating Parameters for Algorithmic Image Generation' in proceedings of Digital Creativity conference, Brighton University, 1995

[7] King, Mike, 'Syntax Channelling and Other Issues affecting Innovation in the Graphical User Interface' in Eurographics '95 conference proceedings as Computer Graphics Forum, Basil Blackwell, 1995

[8] Cited in: Wilber, Ken, Quantum Questions - Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists, Boston and London: Shambhala, 1985, p. 4.

[9] Barrow, John D. and Tipler, Frank J., The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1986

[10] Capra, Fritjof, The Tao of Physics, London: Flamingo, 1992 (3rd edition)

[11] Zukav, Gary, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, London: Fontana, 1979

[12] Tarnas, Richard, The Passion of the Western Mind, London: Pimlico (Random House) 1996, p. 48

[13] Augustine (Saint), Confessions, (trans. Pine-Coffin, R.S.) Penguin Books, Middlesex, England 1986, p. 97

[14] Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Theory of Colours, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 1976

[15] Wilber, Ken, Quantum Questions - Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists, Boston and London: Shambhala, 1985, p. 35

[16] Gould, Stephen Jay, Rocks of Ages, London: Jonathon Cape, 2001

[17] Wilber, Ken, The Marriage of Sense and Soul, Newleaf, 1998

[18] The rest of the Virtual Visions series, and other artworks by the author can be seen at www.mkvv.com

[19] Digital Art Museum is at www.dam.org

[20] Kuhn, Thomas, S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996