This is what you get when you let your “skills” get rusty. That I’m still able to open programs at my advanced age of 52 is probably a testament to the tenacity of a guy who doesn’t want to get old. Sure, it’s kind of gross and pig-like, but it was a creative exercise. An exercise that I’m not exactly proud of, even though there was some method behind the madness.

Starting with Makehuman (Free), I created the 3D central figure. He/She once looked passably normal – until I took it into 3D-Coat (Not free but only $99 for the educational version), tore open its maw, and gave it cockeyed eyes. I don’t really know what happened that holes were torn open under the nose.

Next up and continuing in 3D-Coat I went into the unfamiliar paint room and attempted to put color to its skin, toss on some hair, darken the eyes, and finally painted the shirt so he/she wouldn’t be naked. Satisfied that this was on its way to being an abomination, it was time to move it to the third piece of software that would be used in my juvenile massacre.

Krita was my weapon of choice (Free). This stand-in for Photoshop (Not-Free) is getting better, though some of my employees would probably argue that. As you might guess, I’m no expert in Krita, but I think I did pretty good on the mountain, well, at least better than the tree.

Frustrated at my crap Krita skills, I decided to put to work my equally poor Photoshop compositing abilities and truly prove the old maxim “Use it or lose it.” I think I’ve probably shown you just how much I’ve lost it…. a good thing you don’t have a baseline to judge me by. After much struggle, I was able to paint in a sky from one of my photos using a mask. Trust me, it was luck.

The Northern Lights electric fire sky treatment is courtesy of BlackInk ($45) from France. The only reason I point that out is to make sure that any French-intolerant trolls go ahead and leave now because I also use Substance tools from Allegorithmic, and they are French, too, though I didn’t use anything from them here. I’m certain they must be happy I’m not defaming their name by involving their great software in the creation of today’s image.

Enough of the self-disparagement. We should all be striving to fight against our digital incompetence and embrace our own set of computer toys, no matter how amateurish what we create might appear to others. I made this using a combination of 3D human modeling software, 3D sculpting software, and a few painting packages. After I was done, I wrote and published this blog entry because what else is there to do at 11:00 pm on a Wednesday night? Watch TV? Whatever. I’d rather play.

Peristalsis – noun peri·stal·sis \ˌper-ə-ˈstȯl-səs, -ˈstäl-, -ˈstal-\: successive waves of involuntary contraction passing along the walls of a hollow muscular structure (as the esophagus or intestine) and forcing the contents onward. More commonly known as shitting.

There should be a word similar to peristalsis that applies to the mind and a lot of what we’ve stored in it that allows us to know that we are excreting the stuff we don’t intellectually need. What happens to the nonsense, irrelevancies, most of the TV inanities, dramas, and random information we don’t need?

Maybe we need it after all because one never knows when something might become a reference node to a new abstraction not anticipated when we were younger and cleaning out the cobwebs of the mind. This brings me to my blog post of a week ago, System of Wisdom, in which I was talking about our ability to store information. If we have a near-infinite ability to create our own library, even if we have no idea how to consciously reference the majority of it, then the contents of what we put there may have a greater impact on our future selves than we know and yet we have no known way to clean out the rot.

I’ll give a crass example: if one persistently witnesses violent arguing and fighting until the victim is beaten down as examples of conflict resolution and does not know anything about negotiation and compromise, then how could we fault them for choosing the fistfight when challenged? These are the reference points of experience and the lessons learned from what we’ve seen and been exposed to.

On the other hand, if your parent is a business person who does good things but occasionally gets into difficulties. You see him making money, buying himself and his family the items that represent success, but when something goes wrong, he refunds the customer’s money or finds himself in court where a settlement is negotiated by calm minds that determine a resolution that doesn’t resort to violence. This is a civil society. It is also the imprint on the mind that will act as a guide on how issues are resolved, hopefully.

While this is a great big generalization there might be some wisdom behind it too. Maybe we should think twice about what we are feeding our minds. If what we put there only turns to poo and fails to offer nutrition and a healthy perspective, then is it possible that our diet of junk food intellectualism is nothing much more than salty grease and fat with a dose of sugar that is producing a kind of mental diabetes?

I think the answer is yes, we are poisoning the brain we seem so intent on turning into feces.

This brings me back to the title of this blog entry, peristalsis. Maybe the word and function I am looking for is cerebrostalsis? The act of squeezing the crap out of our brains.

Just as exercising the body is intended to tone it and help produce a healthy metabolism while controlling the diet supplies the nutrition that keeps us humming along and able to function in a lively and productive way, what of our attention to brain health?

And why is this blog entry here if Timefire is building a Virtual Reality game, you might ask?

Because we are not technically making a game. Timefire is creating the world’s first smart digital city that is part of the planet called Virtual Reality. We will not be the only city in this new frontier. There will be cities of mayhem, violence, bloodshed, zombies, rape, murder, hatred, war, monsters, hentai, and every other imaginable form of carnage and sadomasochistic pleasure others will build their fortunes on.

Hypatia is not one of those places. With tongue-in-cheek, we are the enema for your mind. We are the cerebrostalsis that is coming to clean your brain. If you like to think and create or did so at one time before it was purged from your playful, curious former self, we are the place to go to reawaken your imagination.

Social Networks. This is not a concept that came to humanity with the emergence of Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter. The Social Network is an essential part of the fabric that defines our very culture, and it stretches back many millennia to the beginnings of our use of symbolism.

In caves, on beads, and on cliff walls, we find markings, images, and other traces of messages left for others. This form of artistic communication transcends space and time and is some of the earliest proof that humanity was building a primitive social network. You see when someone leaves “graffiti” for others to come across at some future point, they have left an implicit message, “I existed, and I leave you this clue to my having been here before you.” This brings the visitor into the social web of having shared the same space with the original poster.

As society has evolved, we strove for better communication that would give more effective insight as to who we were. Using cuneiform symbols and, later on, hieroglyphs, we started leaving exacting details about our history and accomplishments. Sculpting arrived about 2300 years ago, while woodblock printing came to us 1,100 years after that. As technology improved, we witnessed the 15th-century arrival of the printing press using movable type, but still, we would need another few hundred years for the steam engine to help launch mass production and give us the ability to print lots of newspapers and books that would in-turn allow greater sharing and distribution of information.

These accomplishments were essential in allowing us humans to share knowledge as it pertains to history and for the creation of literature that would allow us to dream forward about what the future might look like. We were well on the road to a global social network.

Approaching the 21st century we witnessed an explosion of communication technology. Radio, movies and TV, the phone, the Internet, and, more recently, the smartphone have all been instrumental in networking our globe. The people that we reach out to in far away places, sharing conversation, photos, and cat memes, form our new social network – it is immediate and spontaneous. Often, though, our view is clouded by brand awareness by defining the social network as something that resembles Facebook.

Bruno Latour, in his book, “Reassembling the Social – An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory,” attempts to bring clarity to this complex idea by letting us know that the social network is not simply the closed system of interactions between known actors in a particular location. The network is complex and is now likely impossible to define as the breadth of global inputs from our modern communication and entertainment system is working dynamically and chaotically to connect people independent of systems of association and geographic proximity.

This is an important concept because as we humans start to explore Virtual Reality, we are closing the final gap between information and experience. From early history leading up to today, we have been observing the world and building experiences based on our physical location and access to scarce resources. This required our proximity to or observation of landscapes, artifacts, images, videos, and lectures about the particular subject matter. From this, societies and organizations would arise, allowing like-minded participants to share their particular curiosity.

With the advent of VR, all are welcome to visit the cave of the mysterious image. Every one of us will be invited to interpret newly discovered hieroglyphs from places that only exist in the imaginations of those sharing their art. As experiences are a large part of how people illuminate culture and history, we can project that the form and substance of global communication will need to change as it responds to millions of new vantage points brought on by VR. The shared environment will no longer be locked to a geographic locality or certainty about cultural perspectives. Our written and visual languages used to interpret this new social network will need to evolve as rapidly as the art and tools that are producing this shift.

It is in our nature to leave a mark, be it momentarily in the dirt, like a handprint on a cave wall, maybe with pigments on a canvas, or as little letters printed on the screen before you. What will this all mean when our mark is left upon this new type of reality? What kind of culture and history will we create? Where will our art be found by future generations who explore the places we have been while immersed in Virtual Reality? How will they interpret our social networks that will have continued to reach out across space and time?

The long quiet here at PSOIH is due to the fact that things changed along the way as we were building VR. Virtual Reality is a huge undertaking, and it turned out, of some interest to others. As the Game Developers Conference (GDC) concluded and April played out, not only was Sony getting into the game with Morpheus, but Facebook grabbed Oculus and gave them enough money to start to do very serious work. Simultaneously, I started a conversation with an old friend, Jeffrey Rassas, who took an immediate liking to what some guy and I were doing, and he also saw what we might accomplish with greater resources. In just a couple of weeks, we were on our way to hiring others and inviting them to join us in our new office.

One thing I learned between January (Steam Dev Days) and March (GDC) was that nearly everyone was having a problem pronouncing PSOIH, so we changed the name to TIMEFIRE. Our new domain is over at www.timefirevr.com – someone who I cannot seem to contact already owns the domain of plain old timefire dot com.

As TimefireVR or simply Timefire, we migrated away from UDK and fully embraced UE4 (Unreal Engine 4 from Epic), and now we have two others helping us explore the possibilities that UE4 has to offer. One of those new people here at Timefire is Ariana Alexander, who created this characterization of Czech musician Jiri Wehle using MakeHuman, Blender, and UE4. We’ve also brought on Brinn Aaron, who is working with Blender, UE4, FMOD, Bitwig, Circle Synth, GlitchMachines tools, and, of course, Allegorithmic’s Substance Designer. Luis Chavez joined us from a video background but has quickly adapted to Blender and UE4. but has shown great strength in mastering SVERCHOK – a Blender Addon that is used primarily as a parametric architectural tool that also has many options to be used as an element for creating art. Also on board are Rainy Heath and Dani L’Heureux, who are working their way through Blender, Substance Painter and Substance Designer, some Illustrator, and MakeHuman.

The term Virtual Reality may seem dated; after all, it has been over 70 years since poet and actor Antonin Artaud first penned the words “la réalité virtuelle.” Although his 1938 definition may seem far removed from what our technologically advanced world is about to deliver, his ideas were far from off base. He envisaged the theater as a place where the alchemical mythologies of man would become the “incandescent edge of the future.” Well, that is the verge of where we are today with a light-emitting headset called Oculus Rift that will allow us to peer not only into the future but across time and reality in ways the mass of humanity has yet to fathom.

The transmutation from lead into gold was for alchemists what the crafting of story and image into content is for our time. Storytelling is an ancient art, maybe 40,000 years old, as dated by cave paintings in Spain. Early plays and dances have existed for thousands of years, but it wasn’t until the 15th century that the narrative became a tradeable currency. The printing press brought with it the ability to distribute information to the masses. For the next 400 years, printing would dominate our communication channels until the arrival of the telegraph, motion picture film, and telephone. Together with television, the moving picture would show people across the globe an unknown world previously only written about in tomes or told to one another in an oral tradition.

It has taken us tens of thousands of years to reach the juncture where information is ubiquitous and driving nearly all human activity. For example, the global publishing industry is now worth $108 billion, effectively making it the 60th largest economy if compared to other countries. The global movie industry is puny in comparison to approximately $35 billion, while video games generate about $92 billion of revenue. All of these industries are being wrapped up by the new kid on the block, the Internet. That virtual department store/library/theater is currently facilitating over $3 trillion of business – the Internet is the essential utility of our future.

What this all has to do with Virtual Reality is that we are at the point in time that marks the beginning of the future of humanity, just as art, printed language, and advanced communication did during their time. It is the convergence point where we enter hyperdrive. I make this prediction as though it was as easy as identifying a cave painting where the artist drew a horse, and we all know it’s a horse.

All of humankind tells stories, we all have histories, we all celebrate our past, and most of us have dreams of the future. In VR, all creative and consumptive lines converge. We meld together and share the written word, the image, the game, the transaction – and we do it in an environment that speaks to and puts on display the dreams that live on the “edge of the future.”

We are all about to be thrust into new roles as architects of this future. This will be a place of alchemical experimentation where mythologies will come to life, not as two-hour celluloid epics, but in places where we dwell and create new myths. Except, we are neither intellectually prepared nor technologically advanced enough for what we must start preparing for – now.

While knowledge is everywhere and readily accessible, how many of us revel in the acquisition of the abstract and intricate? Most of those I see are more interested in the trivial and mass-produced banal culture as doled out by faceless corporations concerned with shareholder wealth and executive salaries than in the evolutionary intellectual vitality of their fellow people.

Our next point of embarkation must be on the vehicle of high-level brain exploration. The technology to show each other our dreams is soon upon us, though right now, it leaves much to the imagination as it can only deliver a fraction of the aesthetic fidelity we are fast approaching.

To return to my statement in the first paragraph regarding what we understand or fathom, Virtual Reality will be a magnifying glass, a kind of tunneling electron microscope that will peel back the layers of the onion to expose things for what they are. We have always been visual learners and quickly pick up on what the image holds. It is within VR that the image will become ever more intoxicating as technology advances to render greater beauty and detail out of the abstraction of pixels. Humans give order to chaos; we set letters in sequence to form words, we align and contrast colors to create art, we capture fleeting images of light in movies and then stand back in awe and sometimes cry at what we’ve created. Here at the edge of the future, we will continue our traditions to make sense of things, and while I am still uncertain as to what VR is ultimately going to look like, what I do know is that at the other end of its trajectory, we will see a global society finally having achieved its Magnum Opus, we are on the verge of discovering the elusive philosopher’s stone.

The original image is available from Gallica Digital Library under the digital ID /ark:/12148/btv1b8539368j. This image is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.

Today, we tripped into a new light-bending paradigm, secret software with a secret sauce that we have to remain mum about. This is literally the very first thing we painted with it, and we’ve only scratched the surface or etched its Normals if you are of the 3D digital artist persuasion. We’d love to tell you more, but maybe we’ve already shared too much. A new kind of fun will arrive next year, and it will blow plenty of minds, and all without the benefit of drugs.