Over the last few months I’ve had a slow back-and-forth with Isaac Cohen – a game creator whose work caught my eye at GDC because it’s got this wonderful experimental attitude to spaces and play. He also has these gorgeous textures and iridescent effects I haven’t seen elsewhere. I wrote about my own experience of specific games Cohen made like Blarp and Warka Flarka Flim Flam, but with this I wanted to explore what he was creating from the designer’s point of view.
Our emails ended up being quite long so I’m going to pluck out pieces which were of particular interest as we chatted – we started with the shimmering fabric effect that recurs across many of the games!
“As an artist who works in code, you can only really create using what’s in your quiver of tricks. I’ve been doing ‘gooiness’ for so long, and realized I need to branch out to expand my arsenal. I started working on this cloth sim because of this piece of architecture I saw called the B-Mu Tower while reading the book ‘Subnature’ and found it to be so compelling to be able to see the faint ghost of a structure beneath a shimmering veil.”
So that was the genesis of the idea.
“The thing about the digital world is that in general, compared to our reality, it kinda sucks. There’s not very good resolution, if you are on a laptop it’s just a window into that world, and if you are in VR, you are limited by space. The computation of even the best GPU is nothing compared to the simulations of reality, and we get ALL the senses, not just two of them.
“The thing that the digital world gives us is malleability, and extensibility. It lets us expand to realms that might have not before been possible. But still the physical world is one of utter majesty.
“What’s so interesting to me is that in our march onwards into digital progress, so much of what the new technology allows is for the digital to become more physical, more humane. With VR, we get to move our bodies in more ‘honest’ ways, and with better GPUs our simulations can become more organic, more visceral. This to me is the essence of I want to be working on. Making computation more humane.”
The logo Cohen uses for his Cabbibo work is part of that effort. It manifests at the start of each of the VR experiences I played and instead of just being a 2D or 3D shape hovering in space you make out the outlines via the way a piece of this digital opalescent fabric presses against them. It’s like how you could lay a cloth over a shape and then blast it with a hairdryer to make out the edges. His own TL;DR summary is that “I wanted to create a logo that was not static, because this medium should not be static. It should be one that is reactive, flowing, alive.” But the fuller version is interesting so I’ve kept it below:
“When we as humans interact with technology, magical things can happen, and it can become so much more than the strict, quantized, practical world we typically associated with computers. As well, it can reveal a world hidden to us. The logo itself (which to me represents self – Atman, not Brahman) is ‘there’ before the cloth hits it, but we cannot see it. The cloth reveals or points to something beneath it. We cannot tell exactly what that something is, but can see the implications. The shadows on a cave wall.
“Technology can be organic, emotional, vulnerable, even spiritual, if we choose to engage with it in this way.”
One of the experiences which stuck with me from his games – in fact the one I keep coming back to at odd moments because it was such a departure from how I’m used to people using VR technology – is in L U N E. You’re moving these struts around and affecting how a piece of this shimmery fabric drapes across it above you. I had the delightful realisation that I was inside a slowly collapsing blanket fort. It’s a small experience but the effect was powerful. I wanted to know where that project had come from.
Apparently it came just after Cohen had decided to step away from the Cabbibo name (having said what he wanted to say) and was contemplating potential next projects while spending a month in Iceland.
“It kept coming back to this concept of peaceful loneliness. I remember having this one conversation with a friend at one of those 3:00am Iceland sunrises. We talked about this object that we both kept trying to describe. The image I attached is the closest thing I’ve come to finding what I think it’s like [Pip: It’s this image of a quartz crystal cluster] , but there are some songs that feel like they describe the emotion a bit better (Come Down To Us – Burial , for example).
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Source: Rock Paper Shotgun