(^) I’ve written a paper on why MojoWorld is the
right design for cyberspace, “On Engineering the
Appearance of Cyberspace”.
Huw: I don’t mean to be too frivolous, but
MojoWorld keeps reminding me of the character
in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
(Slartibartfast, I think?) who designed planets
and prided himself on the quality of his fjords. Is
this the kind of kick you get out of developing
MojoWorld? The simple pleasure of creating
beautiful things?
KM: You got it! We considered calling MojoWorld
“Slartibartfast,” but Slartibartfast is just not a
pretty name. In fact, Douglas Adams
intentionally made Slartibartfast the most
obscene-sounding name he could come up with,
without actually being obscene. So, not a great
product name there! Although, in January of
1996, Scientific American did, in fact, run a little
blurb on the work leading to MojoWorld under
the title “Playing Slartibartfast with Fractals.”
Actually, I met Douglas on an elevator a few
years back at SIGGRAPH and gave him my
MojoWorld “elevator pitch” — literally! He was
excited about the idea. It’s a pity he passed
away just before its release.
A really interesting question when working in
MojoWorld is whether you, as the artist ‘driving’
MojoWorld, are creating or discovering these
worlds. It’s one of those unanswerable questions
— both are true, and neither is true. Sure, in an
abstract sense, they already exist and the artist
merely finds and images them. But, on the other
hand, no one’s going to find the best ones by
accident; rather, it takes a highly intelligent,
carefully guided search that certainly qualifies as
“creative”, to find a good one and bring home a
striking image or animation of it.
This is yet another fascinating aspect of
MojoWorld — to my warped mind at least. Hell, I
wrote a 30-odd page paper on this topic, too,
titled “Formal Logic and Self Expression.” If
you’re up for a thorough flogging of the topic,
you can get it online.
Huw: But isn’t it the mathematics that is really
of the essence?
KM: Definitely not. Real mathematicians rightly
consider the maths I do to be what they call
“trivial.” Yes, that’s the mathematical term they
use. The mathematics are my means of creation,
that’s all. All artists have tools: Painters have
paints and paintbrushes, sculptors have chisels,
musicians have their instruments, poets have
their words and dancers have their bodies. They
know how to use these tools to create their art.
I use mathematics similarly: Equations give me
shapes and ways to combine them; I’ve learned
to be facile at creating interesting and beautiful
things this way. But my reasoning and intuition
are entirely visual; it’s just that I construct
things mathematically. Simple equations are the
tools I use to sculpt and paint my artworks.
Now that’s certainly an unusual way to think and
work, and we certainly don’t want you to have to
become so pointy-headed to enjoy using
MojoWorld, so there’s a user interface that hides
the mathematical machinations from you, the
ordinary user. You can be guided by your visual
intuition, and ignore the hideous machinery that
cranks out the result you’re after. Heck, this is
true for anything you do on your computer,
other than the rare microcode hacker. There are
always software tools, starting with the
operating system, that hide the complexities of
the computer and provide high-level controls
that provide easy results, efficiently. Photoshop
is all math, too, under the hood, but virtually
none of its users are aware of that, and none
needs to be!
However, if you happen to be mathematically
inclined or a programmer, well, then you can go
into MojoWorld’s Pro UI and have yourself a ball.
You can even write plug-ins to extend
MojoWorld’s capabilities, if you like. We’ve
knocked ourselves out to make MojoWorld all
things to all people.
Huw: Speaking personally, I must say that the
greatest joy I get from programming is the
feeling of having crafted something. The thing
that got me interested in programming in the
first place was the old text adventure, Zork.
Maybe if I'd seen fractal worlds instead of text
descriptions of the world of Zork, I might have
spent more time studying maths?
ann
(Ann)
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