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The Great Illusion

http://www.thegreatillusion.com

Written and designed by Victor Kahn
with paintings by Jim Warren (May 2000)
Reviewed by Richard Kade
Ubiquitous Iconoclast
ubiq_icon@hotmail.com

The idea of posting a digital gallery on the web is far from a novel one. Indeed the paintings and poetry viewed and read on this site remind one of some of the greatest classics that have delighted for ages.

Why then is this exhibition noteworthy, especially to the Leonardo community?

The best context for appreciation of the verses and artwork is already provided in the notes about the collaborators, Victor Kahn http://www.thegreatillusion.com/credits.html and Jim Warren.

Attention is merited by one part in particular, http://www.thegreatillusion.com/inside.html.

Unlike the other companion works, many of which evoke memories of Escher's self-referential ambiguities in portraying three-dimensional sights on a two-dimensional plane, this study is most reminiscent of the works of Maxfield Parrish.

But the most important feature of this image is that it is adumbrative of the general direction of digital art and, in particular, harnesses the computational potential of the web for allowing the viewer to interact with the artist in a way that, for wont of any better term, is "webistic." Employing an embedded Java applet, one is encouraged to run one's mouse across the image causing a liquid rippling effect.

To be sure, this is primitive compared to what one anticipates will be afforded on the web of a decade or two hence. But so was the pizzicato "raindrop" background effect accompanying clarinet and bassoon solos of the cadenzas in the second movement of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade" when compared a century later to works by Alan Hovhanness such as "Fra Angelica."

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