Mental Institution For
Digital Art Objects
-- Charles Csuri, 1994

My day begins with breakfast at a neighborhood restaurant and afterwards I drive on to the University. I enter into my studio/office and sit down at the computer. My hope is the system did not crash during the night so I can begin to work. I attempted to log in but I made a mistake.

The first time I misspelled my name since the Csuri letter combination is somewhat unusual. Even though it's my own name it does happen. I was probably tired or I simply didn't have a fourth cup of coffee. When this happens, the system requires you still type in a password before a new name can be entered. The next time I spelled my name correctly but then I made a mistake with the password. Finally, after one or two more tries I was able to log into my computer.

The problems with my name and the password was a foreboding or ominous sign of what was about to take place. I really became apprehensive when there on the monitor was a small icon of a skull. Using my mouse, I clicked on the icon of the skull and up came Mental Institution for Digital Art Objects.

I thought to myself, what in the world? Was this a directory, because I don't remember creating it? Was this somebody's QuickTime movie? Here in front of me was a real-time full color graphics display system. I just could not believe my eyes and for a moment I thought it was a strange, surrealistic dream. (I do remember acquiring an ultra high-speed graphics processor for my computer, and somewhere on my disks is code for such a system).

I found myself viewing a 3D computer graphics environment, all of the 3D objects in high resolution color with sound, lighting, shadows and moving independently of each other. The 3D digital art objects moved at variable rates of speed and they could disappear and reappear in different locations. Clearly, I was entering into a unique community, which was alive with energy and activity.

There were all kinds of abstract 3D objects, simple cubes, spheres and even figures. Because of the great number of digital art objects, it was visually, very complex, and initially the noise level was overwhelming. Somehow the objects had learned to talk and converse like human beings.

Later I found out, they learned all of this from a 10-year-old computer geek, who lives in New Zealand, over the internet. This young genius had worked out truly complex procedures, which made all of this possible. Apparently, he uses ideas from cognitive science, biology, physics, genetics and artificial intelligence. I learned his work is sending shock waves throughout the entire field of computer science and threatens to make it become obsolete. He says computer scientists and programmers will soon have a role similar to that of an automobile mechanic. The digital art objects were textured and multi-colored with representations of flowers, people and animals. They were beautiful, enchanting and even mysterious, especially when I recognized them as objects from my own pictures. (Of course, they had to be something special.) They soon became aware of my presence, coming up to me and to my amazement, began speaking to me. I asked them, where did this community come from, and why in the world did they call their community, The Mental Institution for Objects. They said, once I finished a picture and had it recorded as a print, then there was no role for them. I discarded them and as a consequence they had a strong feeling of rejection, felt used, feeling very lonely with a profound sense of despair. They became dysfunctional and unable to cope with reality outside of the directory.

They said, they have feelings like a human being, they were not mechanical, but also had a spiritual life. In order to survive a community of digital art objects was formed so there could be a sharing of thoughts and feelings. They needed hope that eventually someone or something might help them to move on to another world and a better life. Initially, I was so overcome I did not know how to respond to their concerns, so I just made observations about their behavior. There were several cubes having a dialogue about infinity. One said they always had a strange dream about infinity. It was a fuzzy notion about time and distance. She complained, when I set parameters in my computer program, I would never let her go past the number one. I, obviously, was too conservative and we would never find infinity, unless I had the courage to go past the number one. Then I noticed a sphere, which had the hiccups changing from a sphere to an ellipsoid, and back again to a sphere. I found out I had set a scale parameter incorrectly, as a consequence it was miserable, going through life with this ailment. The object pleaded with me to make the necessary change so they could have a normal life. There was a cube moving through space and it giggled all of the time. It just simply had this silly giggle, like a very young child, who had some secret they would keep to themselves. I never did find out, why it giggled. Another cube talked to one of our PhD students in computer science and he taught him how to make a skeleton with joints within the space of the cube. The cube became very flexible with the ability to bend, twist and move its vertices like arms and legs. This cube became so excited, went around hugging other objects and saying, "I love you", "I love you".

-- Charles Csuri