Astrogun™ Powergrid™ Early Access Now Live

[XanderDavis]

Well as I've joined up here just in time for the forums to maybe close, I thought I'd share with you my latest project, which is indeed influenced by Tales of Tales, the Realtime Art Manifesto, the Notgames Not-Manifesto, and the Beautiful Art Not-Manifesto...

DOORS OPEN



A NEXUS OF ART, DESIGN, MUSIC, GAMES, & COMMUNITY
http://powergrid.astrogun.com

This is an Early Access virtual reality art gallery and club, first featuring works by Astrogun and myself and will expand to feature works by other artists, including original VR art-- with your support!  This is in Pre-Alpha now.  I'm working on getting multiplayer functionality in next, so we can all join up together in shared space with avatars and voice chat.  I'd also like to get 3D art creation tools integrated into the world, so you can do things like create laser drawings in 3D space.  Lots of possibilities-- this is only the beginning.

Let me know what you think!  I've always wanted a cyberpunk virtual reality club made of neon holograms, electronic music, and laser beams...  However, I am very interested in evolving this past the club setting-- hidden passages that will take you to "VR art" environments to explore.  The overall goal of this is to not create a game, but a place-- a nexus of art, design, music, and (sure) games-- as the starting point for discovering something new within.  If anything this will allow me to gain more experience with VR design and the not-so-called notgames not-paradigm I find myself getting progressively more interested in as a developer over (progressively disinterested) traditional video games.  A lot more.

I ultimately want to use virtual reality to take people into a place of spiritual enlightenment through the raw beauty of art and design.  I hope to really push much further what I've done in this first pass pre-alpha and take it to something way beyond this.

[Michaël Samyn]

This does remind me of my cyberpunk reading days. I would be curious to live that fantasy. I wonder if you will also include the sense of the transgressive and illegal that those spaces had. Sex? Drugs? Black market? Danger?

I also wonder about the art on display. Because I imagine that people who visit this virtual space would be particularly interested in interactive art, not necessarily in pretty pictures on the walls. Are there any parallels with Sony's Home environment, which functions as a hub to acces, basically, interactive commercials? Will there be holo-suites?

[XanderDavis]

Yeah cyberpunk has been almost unshakable for me lately.  This is definitely intended to be a graphic-design driven playground for those kinds of things, holograms, signage, fake brands.  But I'd really like to find a combination of the future-trash cyberpunk aesthetic with the incredible beauty of art.

The comic art on the walls in Powergrid now is from a multi-year project of mine called Radical Sleep, a cyberpunk spin on the concept in the film Inception, of designing dreams and entering dream worlds, there being an emergent high-tech/low-life criminal underworld around this.  But the dream worlds themselves would be beautiful and surreal, moving even.  Then--

I finally got my Oculus Rift in April this year, and I realized the ability to design dream worlds we could step inside had come true.  Like you eventually have stated in your Beautiful Art Program, we can simply make realities. Realizing this sort of killed the narrative project Radical Sleep in a post-modern conceptual kind of way, because the whole thing was no longer fiction-- I could actually do that, design and sell dreams now.  And very radically have I been falling out of love with games and in love with the concept of realtime art.

Maybe separately from Powergrid or starting within it, I could see Radical Sleep being reborn in VR as not a game but more of an experience of art.  Evolution.  At the very least, I definitely do want to move past art-on-walls and push Powergrid into being an incubator for new VR + interactive art in general.  Virtual reality will make architecture the new punk rock.

[Michaël Samyn]

Virtual reality will make architecture the new punk rock.

Haha. Indeed. Architecture is far more relevant to videogames than film or any other narrative fiction. Although of course everything can be inspiring.