IDEA_ON>!


Launch Emulation
Artist: Troy Innocent | Title: 'IDEA_ON>!' | Year: 1994 | Emulated in AusEaaSI: MacOS9.0.4
Credits: With permission of the artist.

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About the work

Troy innocent’s ‘Idea-On>!’ proposes a new language of cyberspace. Inspired by the abstract nature of code as a form of language, ‘Idea-On>!’ presents five distinct “prototypes for virtual worlds” populated by Innocent’s iconic knowbots, cuties, noodleboys and iconbods. Writing about the work as an exploration of the potential of multimedia in the catalogue for 1996 CD-ROM exhibition “Burning the Interface”, Innocent explains his intent to create a new language for computer art combining a unique vocabulary of signs and symbols with computer generated sounds:


‘IDEA-ON>!’ presents the manifestation of fragments of my own personal reality in what appears to be a living, breathing world. The approach to multimedia rejects traditional flat user interface design, and offers the user many different forms of engagement through four “new realities”, each prototyping different aesthetic, structural and communication based approaches to virtual space. It is interactivity for interactivity’s sake, experimentation with what is possible, experience based as opposed to information based. Things may happen without user interaction, more obscure exploration may be required to find hidden places, or responses given by the objects and beings will vary, often following a surreal kind of logic. Visiting the ‘IDEA-ON>!’ installation can be likened to visiting a sacred site where spirits and myths reside. The information space inside the computer becomes a dreaming or meditational space, a manifestation of the subconscious where the objective contents of thoughts are stored for others to explore and experience. Similar in the way pre-linguistic societies would have a shared body of myths and legends which made up their perception of the universe, a world like ‘IDEA-ON>!’ jumbles together many things towards a prototype of a dreamlike, surreal, communal cyberspace in which people dream, create, imagine, and play with thought and form (Leggett & Michael, 1996:70).


References

Leggett, Mike, and Linda Michael, eds. 1996. Burning the Interface: International Artists CD Rom. Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art.

Tofts, Darren. 2005. Interzone: Media Arts in Australia. Fishermens Bend: Craftsmen House.

Tofts, Darren. 1999. Parallax: Essays on Art, Culture and Technology. Sydney: Interface Press.

Screenshots

IDEA_ON>!
IDEA_ON>!
IDEA_ON>!

Artist Biography

Dr Troy Innocent (he/they) is an urban play scholar, artist gamemaker and Director of the future play lab at RMIT University in Narrm Melbourne. The lab develops socially engaged and site responsive urban play connecting experimental game design, public space, posthuman methods, and creative technologies. Working with the city as a material, their approach to reworlding develops posthuman methods that reimagine, reconfigure and reconnect with the world. This involves transdisciplinary practices across design, sculpture, animation, sound, light and installation using methods of multiplatform storytelling that connect objects with their environment to build speculative worlds that playfully defamiliarise and disrupt urban life.

These worlds explore connections between language and reality, working with the affect of constructed aesthetic languages that traverse geometric abstraction and digital iconography, learned through play. Innocent has 25 years of experience in gallery-based exhibitions, symposia and site-specific projects, developing augmented reality games that blend physical objects with digital interfaces to reimagine everyday urban environments in playful ways; situating his work in Aarhus, Melbourne, Bristol, Barcelona, Istanbul, Ogaki, Sydney, Tampere and Hong Kong. They are creator of ‘64 Ways of Being’, an urban adventure platform combining audio walks and mixed realities to situate players in new experiences of place.