Fool’s Paradise is a virtual world based on the “Proverbs of Hell” of English poet and artist William Blake. Intermedia data structures inform its visual and musical composition, developed in collaboration between artist Paul Hertz and composer Stephen Dembski. Visually, Fools Paradise riffs on English Romantic gardens and the changing aesthetics of VR, from the CAVE to game engines and goggles. The virtual world offers forty-eight interactive pavilions linked by a network of paths. Each pavilion interprets a proverb as a song composed by Stephen Dembski for soprano, flute, cello, and spoken voice, as a mask (by Mark Klink), and as calligraphy (by Koy Suntichotinun).
Online resources for Fools Paradise II:
Paper from the proceedings of the xCoAx Conference in Madrid, 2018:
http://2018.xcoax.org/pdf/xCoAx2018-Hertz.pdf
Description of Fools Paradise at Radiance.org:
https://www.radiancevr.co/artists/paul-hertz/
Video screen capture, 2018:
https://vimeo.com/275872073
Video short of Fools Paradise I, live musical performance and VR, 2004:
https://youtu.be/1eA9LosAXyI
Flickr album covering the development of Fools Paradise:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ignotus/albums/72157662974244038
Ignotheory generative system:
http://paulhertz.net/worksonpaper/pages/ignotheo.html
Dick Higgins’ essay on Intermedia:
HTML PDF
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790.
http://www.blakearchive.org/work/mhh
Videos of visual music, a form of intermedia:
Center for Visual Music
http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/
Làslò Moholy Nagy, Light Space Modulator (1930):
https://youtu.be/fNt39WJQqjg
Oskar Fischinger, An Optical Poem (1938):
https://youtu.be/_kTbt07DZZA
Mary Ellen Bute, Synchromy Number 4: Escape (1938):
https://youtu.be/YRmu-GcClls
Norman McLaren, Begone, Dull Care (1949)
https://youtu.be/svD0CWVjYRY
Jordan Belson, Allures (1961):
https://youtu.be/SJ04bI39510
John Whitney, Arabesque (1975):
https://youtu.be/w7h0ppnUQhE
Vibeke Sorensen, NLoops (1989):
https://vimeo.com/89483425
Jack Ox, VR visualization of “Im Januar am Nil,” music by Clarence Barlow:
https://vimeo.com/18257786
Other resources
A blog from 2008 about intermedia, edited by Jack Ox and Paul Hertz:
http://www.paulhertz.net/intermedia/
http://www.paulhertz.net/intermedia/toolkit/
Semiotic Temporal Units at the Laboratoire Musique et Informatique de Marseille:
http://www.labo-mim.org/eng/index.php?2008/10/14/10-ust