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Futureactive Kid Part 1 Futureactive Kid Part 2 By definition, every music lover is also, inevitably, an evangelist. That is to say: Inescapably, the evangelist's is a personal and subjective project, and rightly so, as one listener's undiscovered gem is another's undistinguished detritus. Nevertheless, it remains an open question, this thorny subject of art as oligarchy or meritocracy: All of which is a circuitous preamble to a more modest thesis, that being: Happily, Sandro's new album, Impossible Spaces — his first release since , and, not coincidentally, his most accomplished to date — will, with any justice, achieve the work of that proselytizing far better than me.
Among the lively artistic community of Toronto, Sandro Perri, whose other musical projects include Polmo Polpo and Glissandro 70, is all but universally beloved as a local and national musical treasure. Indeed, unprompted, many Toronto musicians will tell you that Sandro is the true best exemplar of that unique intersection that characterizes the city's omnivorous musical scene: After four years of writing, recording, and self-production, Impossible Spaces has delivered on the promise so abundantly present in Sandro's earlier work; and with it, a synthesis of the experimental, electronic and singer-songwriter modes that have marked his evolution as an artist.
On first listen, Impossible Spaces seems to position itself self-consciously as a collection of music about other music. In this sense, we can think of the album as one listener's personal map of music history, with various voices, phrases, and personalities materializing to guide a song for an instant before disappearing again. Upon further listening, however, and true to its title, the album reveals itself as something more conflicted, and seemingly contradictory: Revealingly, the album's opening track, "Changes," not only swipes a title from the catalog of music's most famous chameleon, David Bowie, but also playfully revises the original's "ch-ch-ch-changes" to the more percussive and yet ambivalent "could-could-be changes The lyrics to "How Will I?
Appropriately, Impossible Spaces terminates at a kind of resolution and summing-up point in the closing title track, whose plaintive lyrics were co-written with Perri's deceased friend Jordan Somers. Recorded by Jeff McMurrich at 6 Nassau. Production and mix by Sandro Perri. During his long career as an artist he created thousands of impossible figures that seemingly break the laws of geometry and space. His most famous shape is the impossible triangle which later became more commonly known as The Penrose Triangle. De Chirico chose to paint his own distorted versions of the world around him in the skewed perspectives offered by different fugue points in the same scene, using flawed perspective to prioritize order of perception.
The Human Perception Visual perception is, perhaps, the most important sense of a human when locomotion and orientation are concerned, since it is not only the sense which enables us to visualize and interpret the world around us but also gives us the largest amount of information to do so.
There are some instances when sound and the auditory perception take precedence over the visual system, especially where balance is involved, but the sheer amount of information entered through the visual system makes it the paramount sense when video games are concerned. Everything about human perception starts with the upright position of the body which enables us to differentiate between front-back and left-right Tuan, The only axes that are relatively static are the top-bottom axes which would only change in case the body finds itself floating in a zero-gravity environment.
Furthermore, depending on the distance from the observer to the object observed, the distance can be differentiated into 3 categories: According to Tuan , a human cannot look at a scene in general since our eyes will always look for a place or scene to rest upon. Kevin Lynch also individuated landmarks as a defining element to create memorable spaces.
This is done consciously when we deliberately search for a landmark or unconsciously when a feature in the horizon is so compelling that it demands our attention. There are, of course, many more factors that play a role, either major or minor, in the human perception system.
Colors, size of objects observed, shapes, perspective, and object motion are only some of them, and even these factors can all be sub-divided into more elaborate and detailed sub-categories. The Functions of the Eyes Anatomically, the part of the brain that controls and is concerned with the reception and interpretation of vision is the visual cortex. This is a very curious function for two reasons. Firstly, a region that exists on the far back of the brain is responsible for interpreting the visual signals that come from the front of the human head.
Second is the fact that the right cerebral hemisphere of the brain is responsible for the left-hand side of the body, and the left cerebral hemisphere is responsible for the right-hand side. That way, a well-defined map of the left-hand visual field is formed on the right visual cortex and another map is formed of the right-hand visual system on the left visual cortex Penrose, , pp. Aside from these anatomical details, there are two distinguished features of the eyes that play a prominent role to the way we see and perceive the world around us.
One of these details is that the eye is not the sole organ for perceiving the world around us but only a part of a system that consists of the moving eye, the moving head, the brain and the moving body. With the above system in mind, we can divide the above into three separate visions: The above system is utilized and most prominent in FPS first-person shooter games such as Counterstrike , where quick avatar body and head movements and quick eye movement is necessary in order to rise above other players and survive in this fast-paced PvP player versus payer video game.
The second feature, the anisotropy of left and right, is mostly overlooked and people are generally only unconsciously aware of it. This happens, he realized, because images are read by the brain from left to right which, in turn, changes the way they are interpreted when inverted Arnheim, Notably, even thoughthis is true for cultures with a left-right scansion of written text, it is not universally true for all humans, but mostly for humans in western cultures.
Whether this distinction is biological or cultural is not in the scope of this article to analyse. Mercedes Gaffron, a psychologist, investigated the phenomenon of the left and right anisotropy in the brain further, and related it to the dominance of the left cerebral cortex, which contains the higher brain functions of speech, writing and reading.
This function has been used extensively in video games to a greater or lesser extent. In almost all video games where the avatar of the player is required to stay alive in order to continue playing the game, the most important aspect of the UI user interface , arbitrarily the health and possibly the resources of the avatar, are almost always placed on the top left of the screen.
Consequently, the rest of the UI is placed in key areas depending on their significance to the player and the game mechanics. Even in notable exceptions to this pattern we see the dominance of the left-side. In Dead Space the entire UI was integrated on the avatar of the player but even in that case we can distinguish the definite dominance of the left side in the way the camera is placed above the right shoulder of the avatar and in the fact that the health of the avatar is placed on his back which, due to camera placement, is on the left side of our visual field.
The Virtual World of 2 Dimensions In the early days of video game design, developers had only a limited amount of tools to work with. Despite this fact, the early MUDs multi-user dungeons , which were actually text-based video games, represented the first interactive virtual worlds that demonstrated and utilized impossible non-Euclidean spaces in their game world. Lacking a visual representation of the in-game virtual world, they nevertheless paved the way for hyper-real, impossible worlds.
Once the technology was developed so as to include a series of moving images in order to demonstrate the virtual world to the player, hyper-real worlds started becoming more and more elaborate in their representation. The Legend of Darkmoon , in order to create impossible corridors which were also meant as a puzzle for the player to solve, if they wanted to continue on their quest in the game.
Two-dimensional video games were, in fact, ideal for representing and portraying impossible shapes and non-Euclidean environments. The key factor that contributed to such a fact is the lack of freedom on the part of the player. Just like in an Escher painting, the player of a two-dimensional virtual world is limited in only a fixed viewpoint of the world: They cannot move in a manner that would transcend this limitation any more than a viewer of an Escher painting can take one of the impossible objects that he designed on his hand and rotate it so as to see it from every possible angle.
The lack of perspective During the early s, a new method of representing the virtual world came to being with the introduction of isometric or pseudo-3D environments. These games offered a view of the virtual world that had a very close, but not exact, resemblance to how humans perceive the world around them. While the term isometric has been dominant in describing games that employ a fixed perspective, it is actually one of three axonometric projections used in video games and industrial design.
The other two are diametric and trimetric. The first game to utilize such a viewpoint was Zaxxon , after which many more followed, creating more elaborate and sophisticated worlds that proved to be extremely popular in either isometric or trimetric projections like Populous , Civilization II , Diablo and Fallout.
Even in recent years, there are still games that employ these axonometric projections in their viewpoint as the standard. While isometric view provided a more detailed experience for the players, it still remained an artistic construct since humans never experience their surroundings in isometric view but in perspective. The lack of freedom, on the part of the user-controlled camera, was again the key factor that allowed for such designs to be accurately represented in the game world.
The basic requirement for stereoscopic 3D images is using two cameras to capture left and right eye images. University of Michigan Press. I've long been a believer in Sandro Perri's immense musical talents, from his days blending dance music and lap steel as Polmo Polpo to his avant-folk work under his own name and his math-rock ethno-pop experiments with Craig Dunsmuir as Glissandro Now back to the impossibility of the tribar. The images represent empty stages at music clubs and gay clubs in Los Angeles. However, the stories I enjoyed, I greatly enjoyed, so I assume that the sort of reader who does go for dark fiction will really like this collection.
The 3-dimensional World With the advent of 3D software came the emergence of true 3D computer graphics in the video game world. The engines which have been designed by various companies as the main developing tools of current-date video games operate in the same way, and follow in the footsteps of the major 3D software in the market. Both the 3D software and the various game engines operate on meshes, and utilize cameras and lights to give life to the scene. A mesh is a collection of triangular or quadrilateral in some cases contiguous, non-overlapping faces joined together along their edges.
A mesh will consist of three basic elements, called faces, edges and vertices. Modeling of these meshes occurs when we use a computer to implement the mathematical construction of an object, by defining points in a 3-dimensional array, which is based in the X, Y and Z axis of geometrical space or otherwise called, a Cartesian coordinates system. Essentially, a mesh is the visual representation of a mathematical theoretical object in a Cartesian coordinate system.
The most basic of these meshes are the Platonic solids, or as they are more commonly called, regular polyhedra. Only five of these meshes can exist in 3-dimensional space and in order of number of faces are: These five are the only meshes in 3-dimensional space that satisfy the very strong restriction of looking exactly the same at every vertex Banchoff, , p. Taking the cube as an example and imposing upon it the Cartesian coordinate system, we can see how it is interpreted, mathematically, in the 3-dimensional virtual world.
As we explained before, a mesh is modeled when the computer implements a mathematical construction of the object, by defining points in the Cartesian coordinates system. In the case of the cube, each vertex is defined that way, with a unique set of coordinates that each correspond to a unique location on the X, Y, and Z axes. Therefore, a cube can also be translated as a group of coordinate sets that have the form X1, Y1, Z1 , X2, Y2, Z2 …… X8, Y8, Z8 , with each set describing the exact position of every vertex of the cube in the Cartesian coordinate system. Once we try to impose the same mathematical principles on the Penrose triangle, we immediately realize what the problem is.
Since the Penrose triangle is a mesh, it is correctly identified as having faces, edges and vertices.