The Great Beyond


Since today is another day without actual substantive local content, let me once again point off at something interesting out there in the metropolitan Internet region: an art project of drawings of historical events, rendered in the isometric perspective familiar from computer games (most notably The Sims). There are a lot of the twentieth century's most memorably chilling images in here; a lot of the shock value comes in realizing what the scene you're looking at is, and where in "game world" the truly haunting photo was taken from. I found the project to be quite disturbing, and I'll certainly never play The Sims after seeing the Simworld so thoroughly deconstructed. (The nitpicking part of me felt it was a bit of a cheat to allow the characters as much expresivity and range of motions as they receive: the impact of confining them to the same aligned and locked-in poses that the scenery is held to would have been even greater). It's a very vivid and immediate demonstration of how flattening the view from certain perspectives, both literal and figurative, can be.

And yes, I got the link from Slashdot, but there's a community not exactly disposed towards a thoughtful consideration of the issues raised by technological art.