Ghosts Of The City (Part 2)

Last year I made a series of concrete poems that I entitled "The Ghosts of The City". The image above gives an idea of the form the poetry took... The idea was that the lines all ran together, meeting eachother perpendicularly, and interesecting like the streets of a city (as if the page is a top-down view of city streets). The interesting thing I discovered when I finished the series was that it was fun to see people interact with the words and choose their path through the text. I was thinking that it may be interesting to expand on this idea and create a huge epic poem of some sort following the same format, and then create an installation out of it. The installation would essentially be a projection of the poem onto the floor and people would literally walk along the lines as they read, turning and following their own unique paths as the lines would scroll according to their movements...

Unrelated to that, my friend and I always get into pseudo-intellectual rants about reality and the like, and a while ago a somewhat interesting idea stumbled out of my brain... We were talking about utopias and the possibilities that 'cyberspace' give us to create our own individual reality... So the interesting idea we got talking about was that (perhaps) reality is the mashed-together product of every individual brain's projected utopian reality. I want a tree to be 15' tall, and you want it to be 5' tall, so we both percieve it as 10'... Throw in a billion or so projections and it's pretty radical that we percieve anything at all (under that hypothetical condition).

Neither of us have much training in philosophy but I think that this is an interesting idea to explore, especially with virtual reality becoming more and more realistic. Perhaps I could make a peice where users defined a whole series of parameters to create their own VR utopia, and then a computer combines all of that data to define the same parameters in a 'collaborative-non-utopia' which represents the product of all participant's creations. I find the thought that 'imperfection' can be born out of the product of many 'perfections' to be interesting. It's like you and 5 random people throwing your very favorite color of paint at a wall and ending up with an ugly shit-brown mess.