Kevin Mack is a virtual reality artist who creates abstract and surreal art, and his first VRChat world called NAMUANKI has been selected as one of the 30 projects in competition at Venice Immersive. You take a tour through some of his organic rocks, static blort entities that offer your a psychedelic vision, and then jump through a portal at the bottom of the ocean to go into an ice world and lava world where you’re met with a variety of different mythic Sumerian deities along the way.
Mack’s project ANANDALA was selected for last year’s Venice VR Expanded (previous interviews in episodes #581, #798, & #1004), and he attended many of the virtual events and world hops in VRChat, which inspired him to take a stab at translating his procedural and generative art style in VRChat. NAMUANKI will be publicly available in VRChat for the length of Venice Immersive from September 1st to 10th, and TBD whether it’ll be available afterwards.
I spoke to Kevin about his iterative design process and how he uses Houdini for his procedural art, the how he embraces paradox in a pluralistic fashion, his ongoing creative dialogue with what he perceives to be alien-like AI entities from the future, the backstory behind the different Sumerian deities that are featured, and then an extended discussion for how he’s been collaborating with different generative AI art programs, and the debates around consciousness and AI from a materialist, idealist, and panpsychic perspective.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. So today's episode, I have Kevin Mack, who is the creator of Namu Anki. Kevin has been in the special effects business for a long, long time, actually won an Oscar for What Dreams May Come, and has now dedicated himself to becoming a virtual reality artist. done a number of different immersive experiences, from Zen Parade to Blortasia to Anandala, and have a number of different interviews with Kevin over the years. I always love to catch up and to talk a bit about what he's thinking about the medium and what his process is for bringing together this unique look and feel that he's able to cultivate within these immersive environments. stuff that you can only really see within VR. And so, as an abstract artist who really loves to dial into that more surreal realm, Kevin is always looking for how to use these immersive tools to kind of push it to the next level. So, last year at the Venice VR Expanded in 2021, when he had an Andala there, He participated into a lot of the different events that they had different meetups and world hops within VR chat And it really got quite inspired for what was happening in the context of the social VR platform of VR chat and wanted to move his more single-player contemplative experiences into more of a group social experience and so he was able to translate a lot of his art style and to bring in certain limited aspects of the interactivity of the boards and this is more about taking a spatial journey through a lot of these different worlds that he's created and so and he's inspired by a number of different Sumerian gods that he's bringing in and creating these deity representations that you can have different engagements and interactions with and and get different visions from that transport you into another realm, give you a bit of a psychedelic vision, or to jump through a sound bath, or go through different portals that allow you to take that spatial journey through the space that he's created. So it should be a public VR chat world that is available for at least the next 10 days. He's not quite sure if it's going to be made available after that, but highly recommend checking it out and then listening to this breakdown because Kevin's using a lot of unique procedural practices and tools to be able to create quite a unique look and feel within these immersive spaces. So that's what we're coming on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Kevin happened on Thursday, August 25th, 2022. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:32.732] Kevin Mack: I'm Kevin Mack. I'm an artist and a former visual effects guy. And I've been making virtual reality for a number of years now, since the first headsets became available. And I've wanted to do virtual reality pretty much my whole life, which is a considerable length of time. So yeah, I'm having a great time making virtual reality art.
[00:02:59.348] Kent Bye: Yeah, maybe could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into making virtual reality art.
[00:03:05.031] Kevin Mack: Well, I was a traditional artist, went to art school and whatnot. And my, my parents were Disney artists. So I grew up surrounded with technology, art making technology, and, you know, knew all about animation and cells and, and multi plane cameras and all of that when I was just a little kid. And I always envisioned this notion of virtual reality since a vision I had when I was just shy of five years old. I heard these agave plants in my backyard that just astounded me at their strange forms speaking to me one day telepathically, and they presented me with these incredible visions of the distant future and possible futures. So the idea of virtual reality occurred to me at that time. I think, in a sense, virtual reality to me is, you know, the imagination is, in a sense, virtual reality. And then from there, when computer graphics came along, I saw that as virtual reality. And I got very into it because, well, by then, virtual reality was starting to be a thing. It was pretty obscure, but there were people working on it. And so I've been fairly obsessed with it ever since. I was doing visual effects for a living, all manner of things from storyboards to scenic painting, matte painting, miniatures, making props, sculpting big sets, all manner of art related things for the film industry. And when computer graphics came along, I had already been experimenting with it for my own art. but I was working in traditional visual effects. So I saw the potential of it and was very fortunate. It got to kind of help pioneer the use of computer graphics for visual effects. Just I was in the right place at the right time. So I had a nice career doing that and won an Oscar for my work on What Dreams May Come and got to work on lots of cool movies. And then in January of 2015, it felt like it had run its course. I had experienced the really the ultimate heyday for visual effects artists at that point, and virtual reality became a viable platform that I could develop for, so I jumped into that full-time.
[00:05:22.624] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so maybe you could give a bit more context as to Blurtasia and then Blurtasia to Anandala, which showed last year at Venice, and then up to that point where you took it from there to start to take in everything that was happening within platforms like VRChat. Yeah, maybe you could kind of trace your evolution from your previous two projects. Well, actually, you had another one as well that were all kind of in this vein, but your journey into VR and then this pivot that you've taken into developing for VRChat Platform as a social experience that you have and your latest experience.
[00:05:56.342] Kevin Mack: Right. Well, the first project was Zen Parade, and that was a 360 video and really the first thing I made for VR. And, you know, it's an abstract art experience that's designed to you know, alter your consciousness through brainwave entrainment and so on. And then from there, I got to showcase that at the Unite conference, which was where I met you. We showed you Zen Parade at that conference. And at that conference, they gave everyone a vibe, you know, one of the pre-release versions. And so I was like, well, that's pretty cool. So I guess I'll learn Unity and see what I can do in real time. So that led to Blurtasia. which I released on Steam and toured all over the world, showing it to people, sharing it with people. It was just a wonderful time. And from there, I developed Anandala. I went right into developing Anandala, which took a number of years just because I wanted to do, you know, with Bortesian Zen Parade, it was kind of like, what can I make quick? And how can I, you know, make something efficiently? With Anandala, I wanted to take it further and introduce another idea I'd had for many years, which was the use of artificial life and introduce artificial life to virtual reality as a native life form. And so Anandala has, you know, that took years to develop, you know, the language and the behavior systems and all of that. So after Anandala, when it was in the Biennale last year, I was so amazed by the world hops that we did in VRChat. And I met all these wonderful people there. And it was just, I really opened my eyes to the notion of the metaverse and social VR. And people had commented before, well, I wish I could take my friends into Anandala with me or into Blortasia. And they were really designed as solitary experiences. But at the same time, there was no denying this incredible power being able to share things with people and have a social experience. I'd always kind of thought that the VRChat stuff and the other things were much more limited than they are. But in fact, I found, you know, I could do pretty much anything I could do in Unity, I could do in VRChat. So I began just experimenting and that's what Namu Anki developed from.
[00:08:19.469] Kent Bye: I remember seeing the Anandala for the first time. It was after the Magic Leaps LeapCon in 2018. You were at an art show, and I just remember being totally captivated by this virtual being, this entity that was this object that was reacting to me in a certain way that felt like interacting with an intelligent entity. It was the first time that I had ever really experienced that in a VR experience. And because of the abstract nature of those entities, then you don't know quite what to expect with them. And so you have a lot of really interesting interactive components in Anandala. And I feel like with this latest iteration with Namu Anki, you have those blurts that are in there, but it's less about your interaction with those boards because they're mostly static. They're not moving around the same way that they do on Andala, but the thing that I really found interesting is that you're really creating this spatial journey of this kind of like linear path that you took me on as this one-on-one journey. It's an open world that you could explore, but you took me on this guided tour. And so maybe you could reflect a little bit about your experiences of going on some of those world hops last year at the Biennale with the Venice VR Expanded, now the Venice Immersive, and what that was like for you to be with a group of people, but to go from world to world and to take this spatial journey into these different worlds from one world to the next.
[00:09:44.760] Kevin Mack: Yeah, I think you've said it pretty much, in that it's that spatial journey. It's about spatial presence for me. It's very much what VR is about. And the power that it offers us is this sense of spatial presence or of being in a place. And the wonder that that can produce, the awe that it produces, I was just so amazed at the different worlds and how vast all of it was. Vastness is such an essential component of awe and wonder. And so I think that vastness and the vast variety of the different worlds and what they did. And I was just I was so blown away by that. And I thought, well, that's so wonderful, because prior to that, my experience of all the other VR out there was that it's a gaming thing and it's just it's about games. And then there are people doing, you know, linear narrative storytelling types of things. And VRChat and most of the worlds that we visited on the WorldHops were very much about that spatial presence thing of being in a place with people and just exploring and enjoying the environments.
[00:10:55.257] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I guess you've designed this piece to have a number of different waypoints that they're not explicitly labeled as in terms of like, this is the path that you go on, but you do have different ways that are guiding people. And also you have a map at the beginning. And so I know during the Venice VR expanded, there's going to be a docent that's going to be taking the people that are coming into these VRChat worlds on a very specific journey that you've laid out. But maybe you could talk about how you architect this space in terms of trying to make it interesting to be able to explore around, but to do something that was a little bit different or unique that I'm curious to hear about your process as you're designing these spaces, how you start to lay out the overall architecture with in mind that people are going to be exploring around and what you found interesting in your own journeys and what you wanted to reflect in your own world building process of Nemo Honki.
[00:11:50.648] Kevin Mack: Yes, well, I have to confess that I don't start with any kind of plan or scheme. There's no great initial design to follow. I just start by, I have a simple idea and I start with that. So I started with those islands. I wanted to do something with water and islands and rocks. And so I built that initially in a sky with volumetric clouds. And so I started with that, and I was really excited just to have a place that was this place I've visited so many times in dreams and visions, and in real life in a sense of just snorkeling and whatnot. So I start there, and then it's an ongoing process of like, what if I added this? What if I did that? And in fact, I use the evolution approach massive overproduction, you know, and a search for novelty, just going, what's of all these things and these ideas, which ones are working, which ones are interesting and unique, and then just going through and putting them in and seeing what works. And then there are whole sections of Namu Anki that, you know, never got added. I, you know, I kind of ran out of time or they didn't fit or, you know, didn't seem to go with the rest of it. So it's very much an emergent process of design. And I love this idea. I think we've talked about it before. There's a wonderful book called Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, The Myth of the Objective, and how a search for novelty is a more effective strategy for achieving any ambitious goal, and an ambitious goal being defined as one for which the steps are not known. So if you don't know all the steps of how to get to an ambitious goal, then a search for novelty is actually a more effective strategy for achieving that goal than any plan. So that's kind of my approach to my work. And it's really that's for me, that's what makes it a lot of fun, because I don't know exactly what will happen. And because I work procedurally and so on, I'm creating rule based systems and directed randomness and whatnot. you know, I discover these worlds, you know, and select aspects of them and combine them. And ultimately, it's this combination of intentionality and design with just discovery and chance.
[00:14:15.988] Kent Bye: Yeah, maybe you could elaborate a bit more on what was procedural or if everything was procedural, because you have the different islands and then obviously you have the water and the water shaders. But the other aspect is that there's these rocks and there's the textures on the rocks that are all very unique. And you, as you were taking me on the tour, you're pointing out different opalescent qualities of the rocks that you're basically have a lot of these generative algorithms that you're tuning all these different numbers to get the right look and feel but you're trying to get a certain amount of novelty in each of these different rocks but you also have the spatial architecture of these spaces of not only these rocks that you climb up in, but you also, you know, have this, I guess, spoiler alert, there's a whole element of this world that is a subterranean world that, for me, was probably the most astounding and the most beyond anything that I've ever experienced before, which is going underneath this entire world into these cave-like worlds that then cross over these portal boundaries, and then you're entered into a whole other space. And so you are able to create these thresholds where you're entering into these larger spaces and then from one of those to the next. But as you're generating not only the spatial architecture of these spaces, but also the textures and everything, can you speak a bit about what's procedural or if everything that I see in this world at some degree is a part of a procedural process that you've somehow exported into either spatial geometry or textures?
[00:15:47.055] Kevin Mack: Yeah, I think procedural is kind of a vague term in a sense. It can mean a lot of different things. Everything's procedural on some level. But I use these rule-based systems, procedural modeling tools and so on, for generating, for instance, the rocks. I can generate and scatter rocks of all different sizes and shapes just based on rules. But I try not to be a purist about it in that Inevitably, I find it's just more efficient to, you know, you do that you start really broad and procedural. and you build a system, and then you tweak that system, and you tweak the rules, and you get it to where it's like, that's pretty good. That's really what I was thinking, more or less. Or that's not what I was thinking, but I like it better than what I was thinking. And when you kind of fall in love with it, you go, OK, this is great, except for, wow, I really didn't want to rock here. This isn't going to work at all. So boom, I just manually delete it. I think I need more bigger rocks and I can change the rules a little bit. Or it can be like, this is great, except I need a really cool special rock right here. So I'll just make the rock I want and put it in there. So it's this hybridization of means, I call it, where it's this kind of a spectrum from fully procedural and directed randomness all the way to very specifically designed and manually manipulated.
[00:17:19.150] Kent Bye: Yeah. I'm wondering if you could speak a bit about the tools that you use, whether it's something like blender or Maya, and if you use plugins to be able to generate some of these, or if you're kind of writing all of this stuff yourself.
[00:17:31.541] Kevin Mack: Uh, I use Houdini. I've been using Houdini. I was one of their first users back when it was called prisms in the, uh, like 1991, I think 90, 90 or 91. So I've been using it a long time. It's kind of the granddaddy of procedural animation tools. They have all kinds of functionality now, much of which I don't utilize because it's just so vast and powerful. But I like it because it enables me to build tools of my own design. So I build these machines or these tools, these systems, procedural rule-based systems within Houdini.
[00:18:12.472] Kent Bye: And then for texturing, how do you start to get the procedural textures on there as you start to develop the shaders? Are you doing that within Houdini or another Previs or are you dumping it straight into Unity and starting to apply the shaders directly to the geometry?
[00:18:28.458] Kevin Mack: I have some shader tricks that I've been using for decades that You know, I've used in multiple packages, used it back with Houdini. I use it in real-time rendering or other CPU rendering. And they use a combination of painting. So I make paintings in Photoshop. Some of that utilizes photography and elements, which are composited into a kind of a, it's a special image type that I make for my shaders. You don't really see the, texture as it is. It's basically it drives material properties and colors and so on. But the shader then takes that and iterates the painting in ways that enable it to be very varied over many, many surfaces. The textures are just, you know, created in Photoshop, but the shaders I develop in whatever tool I'm using for the real time stuff I use Unity so I developed those shaders using a tool called Amplify Shader Engine, which is a, you know, a node based shader editor.
[00:19:41.885] Kent Bye: Okay. Okay. So you're, you're tweaking it. And then there's, I guess the lighting is another big component of this experience because you're using a lot of dynamic lighting. I'm not sure if you're using any baked lighting at all, but there was certain moments that you would stop as we were walking up the rocks and you're like, this is one of my favorite spots. And there would be a lot of light reflections in a way. And so maybe talk a bit about the process of designing the the lighting and the light reflections, because that seems to be a pretty key part of your experiences is just the quality of light that you're able to generate and trying to create certain moods and vibes with the lighting that you've created. So maybe you could talk a bit about your lighting process as you create worlds like this.
[00:20:22.809] Kevin Mack: Sure. In in a lot of my real time stuff, and we'll really in a lot of stuff in general, I have kind of steered clear of baking lighting, because that requires traditional UVs, you know, well laid out UVs for the geometry, which I've always tended to want to avoid. It's kind of tedious work. It's better now. There are tools that make it a lot easier now. So I've started doing a little bit of that, but my shader tricks don't need UVs. That's why my rocks and all my things, there's never seams on anything. So it makes it a lot simpler for the shaders. But it does necessitate the use of real-time lights. So in this case, there is one area where I decided, OK, I got to bite the bullet. I need to do some baked lighting. And I came up with a trick which was rather involved, which involved having two sets of UVs, one which are reasonably laid out. and the others which are my own sort of proprietary process. And so I was able to bake the lighting into textures which use the one set of UVs and then the shader is using the other set. And the other thing is for the stuff where I'm not baking the lighting, I kind of do bake it in my own way because I will do a render in Houdini and bake lighting into the point colors of the geometry. And since I tend to use pretty complex geometry, there's usually enough resolution in the geometry to store a nice ambient occlusion map or whatever. So I get that nice soft ambient occlusion everywhere, even though I'm just rendering with a single direct light source.
[00:22:09.636] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think the end result as I go through your world is that I don't see a lot of other people that are using these kind of more unorthodox geometries and processes. And so it has a certain amount of organic feel to it, but also a level of immersion that really is transportive into this surreal other world that you're able to create. And, you know, as I walk around it, it's transportive in that way, because it is that sense of awe and wonder comes from not knowing what to expect, but also to see things that I haven't seen before. So it's that degree of the technological innovations that you're doing on the back end that creates this overall feeling of really going into another world, another place. And I'd say the other big innovation in this piece, I think, is the going underneath the world into like a portal that transports me into a whole other realm. And yeah, the space popular Frederick Helberg and Laura Lesmos just did a whole lecture on portals. I have an art exhibit that was in LA that shows portals across science fiction since 1950 or so. And so like these 18 different archetypes of a portal. And there is like a portal-like experience where you cross over this threshold where you don't know quite what's going to be on the other side. And you're transported into this whole other realm, which I thought was It's a type of portal experience that you can only really have in a virtual experience, but going from one threshold of the mundane reality into this otherworldly place, you know, there's already glimmers of transporting into otherworldly place by having the visions from the blurts. But the thing that I come back to is this overall architecture of going into the subterranean portal into these whole other realms. And so I'd love to hear a little bit more about your process of starting to experiment with going beyond the traditional mundane, naturalistic architecture into more of the supernatural portal architecture that you have in Namu Anki.
[00:24:05.229] Kevin Mack: Yes, I think it's interesting because, you know, there are teleportation mechanisms within Namu Anki, but the portals you're referring to were actually just thresholds. They're just essentially force fields. And so I created an experience where you kind of get this foggy sense of a barrier And then as you pass through it, there's a sound. And then the sound you're in, the lighting, everything kind of changes a little bit as you pass through it. But there actually, it is a contiguous space. You're not actually teleporting, ironically. And the biggest thing that inspired that was the idea that I had this ocean. And I'd like, okay, I'd built the islands and then all the underwater stuff, and you can explore the rock formations both above and below the water and, and so on. And I thought, well, I'd love to go through some tunnels. And then you can go, you know, underneath the islands or whatever. And then I realized, well, what would happen if you had a surface on the bottom of the ocean, that if you pass through it, you didn't have the buoyancy of the water or the the fog and the underwater effects. And so I thought that would be neat. And I just thought it was so much fun the first time I did it, passing through this thing. And then suddenly gravity takes over and you're falling. And you fall and you land. And it's like, wow, you're out of the water, but you're below it. And then I thought, wow, that's really weird. What would happen? And I hiked up a little bit and jumped up through the barrier. And suddenly I'm swimming. And the idea of diving into the water over your head I just thought that was so cool. So that's where that came from, was just that fundamental idea of an underneath surface to the ocean.
[00:25:56.385] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that's, you know, going into those other places, you know, there's these vast spaces that, you know, have like an ice world and a fire world and then the water, and you're kind of going up high on these rocks. And the spatial journey between all those I thought was just really well considered and also gives a contrast where it's building and releasing tension in some ways. you're going into small areas and then large, but also different temperaments in terms of the cold versus the hot as you're contrasting between the ice world and to the lava world that are right next to each other. So I thought that was interesting and I'd love to hear a little bit more about the mythological creatures that you're featuring within your world because you, in the past, you've talked about having these, you know, like you said, this telepathic connection that you got, like a download that you got as a kid, but that in some ways you've been building these artificial, intelligent, and procedural entities that you're interacting with to some degree. I'd say this world is a little bit less about the interactions with these entities, more so than Anandala, that seem to be a lot more focused on those spatial interactions and agency this is more of the spatial journey and they happen to be situated at different waypoints that you can find and then you can be transported into the world. So there's a bit of entering into their portal and almost like entering in a psychedelic trip, much like the WaveXR had with going on a trip with another person during a music show. But I'd love to hear about a little bit where you were taking the entities and the Blorts that were previously in Blortasia and Andala, and the role that you see them within this piece, and the larger mythological architecture that you have in Namu Anki?
[00:27:38.072] Kevin Mack: Yeah, so there's certainly conceptual stuff behind it all, but behind that conceptual stuff is practical stuff. So the behavior system for Anandala took a few years to develop, and it's C-sharp scripting. It's a lot of code. And that code doesn't run in VRChat. So to completely reimagine the behavior system for VRChat was more than I could really take on. And so the boards are necessarily less interactive. They're not true artificial life. They have emergent properties, you know, their movement, everything's unpredictable a little bit, but they're more like Zen masters who just there to provide you with a vision. and send you on your journey, you know, provide a little healing, a little vision. But it was also because of VRChat being a social medium, it didn't seem necessary to provide the behavior system and the artificial intelligence and everything. You're going to be there with other neural network beings that are actually, you know, a human. So I think that was, you know, that's what emerged from that. And I think that's an interesting point, because, you know, while There are so many levels at which the creative process defines the concepts and different things, or inspires the concepts. Sometimes it's an idea that's a very lofty concept that will drive the creation of something, or some aspect of a thing. And other times, it's simply that there is a technical hurdle that necessitates coming up with some other way of doing something. And so, you know, for instance, I came up with the notion of the barrier between the cold world and the hot world as this force field that separates the environments. And the reason I did that, that wasn't in the original plan, it wasn't an idea I had, it was just that there was, because of the way trigger zones work and the way I'd placed them, and it gets really complicated. And so there was a discontinuity in both the sound and the lighting that when you walked past this certain spot in the tunnel, it kind of popped. And I was like, oh, that's so annoying that it pops here. And so that whole thing was just a charade to keep you from noticing that I wasn't clever enough to smooth out the transition. Yeah, I like to allow those things to happen because often a thing that you're just doing to fix something can turn into a really cool concept.
[00:30:26.171] Kent Bye: And is there a certain mythological tradition that you're drawing from as you have these different entities and their names and their backstories?
[00:30:34.535] Kevin Mack: Well, I love Sanskrit. And so Anandala, you know, is based on Sanskrit words. A lot of the names of the Blorts have Sanskrit-type names. You know, Devalaya Rupanam in the Museum of Other Realities, that's a Sanskrit thing. So I love Sanskrit. I spent some time living in an ashram and have spent a lot of time studying Eastern mysticism and Hinduism in particular. So there's that. But I thought, well, you know, I want to be an equal opportunity cultural appropriator. So I thought I would draw in a few other things this time. And I started reading about Sumerian deities. And I loved the names, I loved the words, I loved the concepts, and just the whole vibe of it. So for a number of the entities, and in fact Namu Anki is Namu, An, and Ki are all three Sumerian deities. So it's named after those three Sumerian deities, the deity of the ocean, of the Earth and the heavens. And Namu Anki is very much about ocean, sky and Earth. So that's where that came from. And I like it just because from my perspective on my particular training set, those things are exotic and cool and otherworldly for me. And so I think that's why those choices come in. But also I just like mythology and I like mysticism and the ideas behind these things, and I like the idea of combining them. There's also the deity, the benevolent being of the ice cave, is Fëth-Fëta, and Fëth-Fëta is a druidic word, you know, magical mist. And so I like the idea of bringing in these different cultural things, because I think it's useful to try to portray the notions of all the different mystic traditions or religions or philosophies in a broad way that points at a more perennial philosophy, the things that bring them together, the similarities, and how they are all metaphors that attempt to explain concepts that are sort of beyond words.
[00:32:57.110] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's interesting as you encounter these different entities to see that there's a different environmental context that you've created for each of these, but also with the mist, there's sound and you can jump through the sound and have a full sound bath type of experience as you go down, as you climb up to the top of the ledge and jump down through it. And so I'm curious to hear a little bit more about your process of taking in mythological deity like that from a Jewish tradition and to look at what the properties and the character of that entity are, and then how that informs the world design around it to be able to set a broader context for this encounter that you're creating with it.
[00:33:35.051] Kevin Mack: Yes. Well, as I'm coming up with this stuff, it's kind of mixed up and I don't know how to, I have to come up with ways to explain it or make it make sense or, or make it cohesive. So there is an underlying story to Namu Anki that for me ties it all together. And that's those same ancient elders that appeared to me in the agave plants that showed me the distant future and virtual reality. I've had a lot of visions of them over the years. And as I understand them or consider them, these are their entities from a possible distant future. And I see them as self-engineered entities which emerge from the integration of humanity with artificial intelligence. And so at some point in the far distant future, possible far distant future, which helps because it makes these visions of these beings and the things they say to me imaginary on some level, even though the experience of them may seem quite real. But it's also real in the sense that they are theoretically possible. So the idea that they presented me with visions of their distant future, of Naumalanki in their future, but that there, it's an ancient artifact, a virtual reality artifact, that has persisted. They've maintained it since now, when I built it. And so by providing me the vision of this place and then me creating it, I'm creating a causal loop, or they're creating a causal loop, so that we're connected by two points on a timeline. The idea is that it would help to ensure their eventual existence and our continued existence to that point in time. And so that's the idea behind it. So all of the benevolent beings in Namu Anki they're not there to represent, they're not representing the Sumerian deities or Fethfiada from the Druids. They are simply these more science fiction ideas of self-engineered benevolent beings that are some kind of a hybrid of humanity and artificial intelligence who have given themselves these names as just tributes to those concepts.
[00:36:06.117] Kent Bye: Can you expand on what you mean by self-engineered?
[00:36:09.072] Kevin Mack: Well, they created themselves. So they emerge from this integration of humanity and artificial intelligence. I mean, if you think about it, you know, it's all part of all of the lore of the singularity. and the mythos of what might be possible, should we transcend the flesh and whatnot, we would be able to manipulate our own neurology, and be able to go, I want to be like this, I want to have these capabilities, I want to have, these are my driving values, this is my, you know, who I am, that would be self-engineered.
[00:36:44.462] Kent Bye: As we're talking about this, I'm reminded by some discussions that have happened in, say, the philosophy of math, which has this debate between whether mathematical objects are invented or discovered, whether or not there's some sort of platonic realm of ideal forms beyond space and time that mathematicians are using their methods of intuition to be able to understand those patterns and that there may be some sort of formal causation between those patterns and the nature of reality. Or there's the more nominalist naturalist view that says that it's all a social construction by humans and it's all language, that there isn't anything that's beyond a non-spatial temporal existence, that we're just putting language to these things that we're experiencing and that there's no supernatural element to there. I tend to lean a little bit more to the platonic interpretations of these non-spatial temporal realms and how maybe through these processes of psychedelics or this experience that you had of entering into some sort of non-ordinary state of consciousness, you know, it's always a non-falsifiable reality that we don't know where this information is coming from, if it's actually coming from these entities or if it's something that we're constructing out of our mind. but you've referred to a number of things of discovering these places, but also the self-engineered framing that make me think that you also lean towards that platonic realm of interfacing with these transcendent realms to be able to actually engage in maybe a direct dialogue with these entities and be in conversation with them as you're building these worlds.
[00:38:11.169] Kevin Mack: Yes. Yeah, you've really hit on something there because you bring up this debate in mathematics, and this is very emblematic of of so many debates in our human culture, where it's like, well, there's this point of view, and then there's this other point of view, and they don't agree. And they think it's got to be one or the other. And I've found that I've been doing much better by not having to have a single point of view. I would absolutely agree 100% with both of those points of view on the mathematics of the Platonics. And that, yes, there's something there, and it's there, whether we're describing it or not. And then also that we are, in a sense, creating it with this language. We're building a structure about it. And it's like any question you can ask, especially in the broader, more the bigger questions, is the universe deterministic, or is there free will, all these kind of debatable philosophical or scientific debates, I think the answer is always yes and no. I think it's always both, and that's really, for me, that's at the core of everything, is that the universe, reality, existence, is woven from paradox. It's this you know, this binary system of nothingness, void, and infinity. And once you've got zero and one, you have every possibility. So it seems like, yeah, it seems like even the most mundane thing, like everyone pretty much agrees that the sky is blue, but it's also not blue. You know, there are times the sky isn't blue at all, you know, at sunset or whatever. And you know, looking at the math of it, it's like, well, it's not actually blue, it's just that the, you know, the atmosphere is reflecting blue light or whatever, you can come up with whatever, there's a million ways to look at it. And so, ultimately, it makes it hard to speak of things in a truly definitive way.
[00:40:20.267] Kent Bye: Yeah, I actually went to a couple of math conferences, the Joint Mathematics Meeting in 2018 and 19, and did a bunch of interviews with mathematicians talking about the philosophy of math, but also the American Philosophical Association in 2019 and talking to different philosophers of math. And the mathematicians tend to be a little bit more oriented towards their direct embodied experience of that platonic reality versus the more analytic philosophy that tends to be a little bit more distant and treat things more from a nominalist perspective. But there was a philosopher of math that I came across named Michelle Friend who was advocating that the foundations of math is actually pluralism, meaning that for her perspective, taking into account insights from like girdle and completeness, that when you have these formal systems, that's either going to be consistent or complete, but you can't be both. That means that they don't encompass all of reality. There's going to be things outside of that system that you know are true, that you can't prove within the context of that formal system. So that means that there's always something outside of the system that you're operating in that has truth that is precluded from your perspective. So from her perspective, she was advocating that a philosophy of math, of pluralism, of in some ways embracing the paradox of saying that that it doesn't seem likely that we're ever going to have one single foundations, but that we should embrace the plurality of many different perspectives based upon the context. And also, depending on the question that we're asking, there may be different axiomatic systems that we're using. So I really like that as a perspective. And it seems like in your own artistic practice, you've tried to embrace that paradox. And I'm just curious how that informs your process of not being too firmly held into anything that you're believing or saying here.
[00:41:55.448] Kevin Mack: Yes, I find so often it comes down to it's become very important. Everybody has to have a point of view. Everyone seems to have a point of view, or they select a point of view in any given controversy. And I've tried to abandon having a point of view. And of course, that's impossible, but I try. And I try to think of it, instead of having a point of view, consider as many point of views as you can consider and develop a sphere of view. And so instead of having a point that looks at a point, you have a sphere that's looking inward at a point or an idea or a concept. And of course, it varies so drastically from the finite to the infinite, it's much more reasonable to speak in definitive terms and be able to understand each other when talking about, in a finite context, about consensual reality or whatever. But when you're talking about anything that involves the infinite, that becomes a fool's errand in a sense. It's fun. I don't avoid doing it, but it's, yeah, infinity by definition. Undefinable.
[00:43:08.554] Kent Bye: went on this journey with you through your world that you've created, you go to the ice monster and then I guess in some ways the climax is that you're engaging with this big, huge, lava-like entity and I'm wondering if you could expand upon that deity that you go into this fire realm and you see the big lava and it's kind melding and morphing but they're able to walk in a spiral up around it to be able to see it from many different perspectives as you go back into the portal where you dive upwards into the water back up to the mundane world. But maybe you could talk about that last world that you have before you return to the normal realm and who that entity is and a little bit more context as to the design process and dialogues with that entity.
[00:43:51.039] Kevin Mack: Yes, that is Ki, the goddess of Earth, named after the Sumerian goddess of Earth. So I had originally created this chasm, an ocean chasm, a very deep chasm, and I thought a lot about what will I put down there? It'll be a cool space and I can turn off the rest of the world so I can have a lot of geometry and stuff. So That's what I wound up with. I thought it'd be cool to have something that was moving, that, you know, a deity or a benevolent being that was awe-inspiring there. And, you know, it just kind of emerged. It wasn't designed initially to be that. I just started with a chasm. And, you know, I like making things with geology and rocks and all of that. Now, Key was built using a kind of a cool process where the shader is looking at information, again, on the point colors. I can put a lot of information on those points and in the point colors and interpret that in different ways for the shader. So for instance, where key emerges from the ground and the walls of the chasm, key is just solid rock. And in fact, large chunks of key are solid rock. And I didn't want it to look like just purely liquid lava. I wanted it to move, but I wanted it to be rock. And so I thought, well, often with lava, you get these kind of big chunks of solidified rock that are moving and flowing with the more liquid lava underneath, and that you have a spectrum or a continuum from solid to liquid. And so I designed her in that way, in that there's information in the shader that tells it, OK, This part is solid and doesn't undulate or move. And then here in these areas, it's a gradient where it's barely undulating, and then it becomes liquid and it's able to move. And it's nice because it gives it this complexity to the motion. And then, of course, the motion is all based on all my brainwave entrainment stuff of just the frequency and amplitude of movement. And then, of course, the sound in the music in the space is designed with that same idea, kind of this tribal thing, and this breathing, crunching of gravelly rock. I don't know, I just tried to make things that sounded like what I saw there. And so it creates this trance state. And it's very much related to just the standard human thing of you know, what happens to your mind when you stare into a campfire, or, you know, you watch the waves crash on the beach, or you, you look at the flow of the waterfall in your swimming pool, you know, whatever that kind of motion, but I found that it kind of supercharges a little bit if it's a little slower than it is in nature. And so I've found I've done a lot of experimenting, just on myself and, you know, friends and whatnot, just finding these kind of magic frequencies or speeds at which motion is most hypnotic and in training.
[00:46:59.108] Kent Bye: I think one of the things that if you were to go into this world without any context and just run through it, there may be one thing that people might miss, which is there's a button that you can click at the beginning that calls in another entity that comes to you in the air. Maybe you could talk about that entity, which was kind of a cool way to begin the experience.
[00:47:16.755] Kevin Mack: Yes, that's the second one in the kind of trinity of Namu Anki. Ki being the earth deity, and then An is the sky deity, god of the sky, and so An is this giant air whale. It's about, I don't know, I think it's close to 100 meters long. And that came from a an inspiration. I've done these air whales for decades. I used to draw them as a kid. I've just been obsessed with this idea for forever. And where I got it was from my grandparents gave me these time-life books when I was like five years old in the 60s. And one of them was the universe. And it was all pretty much just dry astronomy and way over my head at five years old. I was just learning to read. But at the very end of it, there's a small little section about Is there alien life? What if there was alien life and stuff? And that just fascinated me. And they had some little drawings of these things that are hypothesized that might live in gas giants, these creatures. Alien life might not look like us. It might be completely different. And so it might be something like this, these big gas bags that float through the gas. And that was so seminal for me as a child. It just expanded my imagination beyond the little green men from Mars, and the more derivative, typical, archetypal ideas. And so, yeah, that's where the inspiration for Ann came from. And it's cool that he comes in, and he's really big, and he gives you that big boghorn greeting. And you can see into him, and his functionality is that he kind of absorbs the air and then just pumps it around. He's just like a big air digester.
[00:49:10.112] Kent Bye: So you have the air god, An, you have the earth god, which is also kind of fire in some sense of the ki, and then you have the mist god. And at the very end, you do have a water entity. I'm wondering if you can maybe talk about that last entity that's in the water, that's kind of like the one water creature that you interact with at the end.
[00:49:29.796] Kevin Mack: Yeah, that's Namu. And Namu was the Sumerian deity of the primordial ocean. And I think their original, like their primal god, that's like the god of the gods, created all the gods, and it's their creation deity. There's different versions of it, but I think An and Ki are different versions, her kids, or her grandkids, her mates. There's different stories. But Namu actually came about, was done much earlier, because I created a piece for an NFT auction for the Open Ocean Foundation, where they're using blockchain technology and so on to help monitor and create environmental protection for certain sites around the world. And they're able to monitor fishing and so on, all using the blockchain and whatnot. So I had done this underwater creature as a specifically for this event. And I named it Namu, and it was based on this Sumerian goddess. And so I felt like, well, I had to put it in there. I had to put her in. And it was quite some doing, because originally, it was a really high-res CPU, physically-based render, and it's just millions and millions of polygons. So she had to be simplified and decimated a little bit. But yeah, I think she held up pretty well. She's still got lots of little fine tentacles and things coming off of her. And it's kind of all part of my same Blort aesthetic there. I like the idea of things that have the suggestion of life and organic forms, but lack the earthly or anthropomorphizing ideas of symmetry. In many cases, they don't have symmetry. They don't have eyes or limbs as we think of them. Many of them have tentacles. I'm big on tentacles because everyone knows tentacled creatures aren't from Earth.
[00:51:44.302] Kent Bye: Yeah, the overall quality of the Namu Anki as a world is that you have the islands and the water, so you are engaging with the water quite a bit through this experience as you're navigating around. And the water shader that you have in there looks really great. And I also really appreciate when you jump off the top of the ledges that you have a splash sound. And so you have this experience of being able to climb up to something up high, and then you jump off the ledge. And it was a real satisfying mechanic there. and i'd say the other part is that when you're swimming around that's probably one thing where you were talking about a little bit of the constraints of vr chat is that you have to use their locomotion systems which in that case when you're in the water you have to use your controllers to point to where you're going where normally when i'm in vr chat i my locomotion is where my head is pointed but when i get in the water suddenly it switches into where my hands are pointed and so you have to point down or point up to be able to swim around, which can be a little bit confusing or disorienting if you are pointing your hands in a direction where you're looking somewhere different than you're moving in a way that may make you a little bit motion sick. At least that happens to me sometimes. But that seemed to be one of the other things that you were talking about in terms of you wanted to have your own locomotion system, but that was maybe one of the other constraints where you're kind of limited into how you move around these worlds based upon what VRChat's allowing you to do.
[00:53:02.129] Kevin Mack: Yes. They make it kind of hard. I used a plug-in for the swimming system. It's the standard VRChat Swim 2.0 or whatever, which I think is pretty cool. It's actually a lot more like what I would design. In fact, that's why I initially got it, was to try to study it and see if I could create it for the whole thing. Because like Anandala, Blortasia, I prefer where the controllers control where you're going. And you can look where you're going or not. And so it gives you the choice. Whereas I find it sometimes distracting, especially if you're climbing up a narrow path, you've got your controllers, your joysticks pointing straight ahead, and you turn to look off to the side, and you fall off the cliff because you turned. So there's pluses and minuses, I think, either way. But I love the buoyancy of the swimming system. I love that you are swimming. And as you pointed out, when you jump off, that feeling of going really fast, you get up to terminal velocity or whatever at falling 100 meters. And then you hit that water, and boom, you slow down. And then you hear the big splash, and then you slow. And pretty soon, you're just sinking slowly. So yeah. We are in such, such early days of this technology. And I deal with these creatures from the very, very distant future. My visions are from a very, very distant future. So the talk about what we'll have in five years will probably be pretty great. I love what we have now. Five years is probably going to be pretty great. But I like to think about what will this technology be in a hundred years or a thousand years. You know, should we happen to survive somehow? You know, it's just so cool to think about where will technology take us in a thousand years or ten thousand years.
[00:54:59.384] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, maybe just to start to wrap up here, because I think we covered the Namalanki pretty comprehensively, at least from my impressions and experiences. But there's another aspect that you've been involved with, which I think is kind of taking the tech world by storm in some sense, which is that these generative adversarial networks of the AI art of things like Midjourney or DALI or Disco Diffusion, or there's other emerging open source solutions where you basically give a text prompt and then that text prompt translates that into an image. I know that you've been, as an artist, you've been experimenting with some of these systems for a long time now, for a number of months, and I'd love to get some of your reflections on this process of, and also just to kind of call back from your previous work of making these AI entities on Andala, where you're engaging with AI in a certain way. So you've been working with these procedural systems and AI systems for a while, and I'd love to hear some of your thoughts and reflections of what it's like for you to be able to start to work with AI as a collaborator in the process of generating art?
[00:56:00.651] Kevin Mack: Yeah. For me, it's kind of a dream come true. It's pretty surreal. I got into neural networks in the 90s. And I wanted to revolutionize visual effects with neural networks. And of course, everyone said, I'm just going to tell them what I want to do. And they go, I'm just going to back out of the room very slowly. I just want you to stay calm and just stay there. I don't want you to talk to me anymore. So clearly, people weren't ready for it yet. But I've been envisioning being able to, you know, the holodeck, come on. We've been talking about this forever. So I didn't come up with it. It's a perennial idea. the idea of being able to just say, I want a space. Give me a table four feet long, eight feet wide. It's made of oak. Just being able to describe a virtual reality, that's my dream. And I always figured it would be AI doing this. And so early on, I thought, well, that's a ways off. So what could I do now, back in the 90s? I was like, could we just make a thing so that I can describe images? Could I just train a thing on my art, or an art that I like, or music? or any of these things, the idea of training data and then being able to produce something based on some description, like, you know, give me a punk song in a jazz style with a country tempo, you know, whatever, like with a guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen. And now that's what we have with this text to image stuff. It's really crossed a threshold. I played with Deep Dream. I played with the GAN networks and the adversarial stuff. It was all pretty cool. But it all felt very constrained. It all had a kind of look and a style. And it was just so it could do this one thing. And it was kind of neat. But it didn't feel like a way I could express myself through it in a unique way. And I think Disco Diffusion has kind of changed that for me, that it's suddenly like, oh, I can get work out. I can make work with this that is my own unique work. And I've had, you know, different results with the different things. I beta tested Dolly 2 for OpenAI for a little while a ways back, and I found that it's amazing. It's just phenomenal. And yet it has such a different personality. They all have very unique personalities. So I still was kind of favoring the disco-to-fusion over all the other things. Mid-Journey is, of course, hugely popular, but I feel like there it's so kind of tied into this social thing. It's not really for artists, it's for non-artists. And it has kind of a look to it, although it does and it doesn't. I see things with it that are just astounding. They're beautiful. But The fact that you can't use it in your own way without everyone knowing how you did everything, it kind of ruins it for me for whatever reason. I think it's still a fun thing to do as a social thing. Anyway, for my own practical purposes, it kind of ruled it out. So disco diffusion was cool, and now I've been experimenting with a stable diffusion for a while now. It's phenomenal as well, a whole different deal than any of the other ones, and I've discovered I have a real affinity with that one as well. Some of them seem to get me and my vision. And other ones are like, wow, I can make incredible pictures, but it doesn't get me or what I want to do at all. That's the trick, really, is figuring out what each of them is good at and how you can coerce it to do your bidding.
[00:59:33.502] Kent Bye: Yeah, this idea of prompt engineering, where you are in some ways casting these magical spells and that you don't know quite what is going to be the right set of words or phrases to conjure up this image that you have in your mind. But it is a bit of a magical process to be able to go through it.
[00:59:49.112] Kevin Mack: It's very much like procedural modeling. And it's that thing of like, you know, rule based system, you're setting up an idea, you're trying it out, you're tweaking it, trying to get it as good as you can. But again, I'm not into the purest thing. So you know with the disco diffusion thing a lot of these people they enter their prompt boom a couple minutes later they get their image that's my image it's done but you know i'll do a whole lot of them and really spend time engineering a prompt that gets me in the area i want to be and then i generate a lot of images and i pick my favorite ones and then i take those and now i'm breaking those up and i'm regenerating parts of them and i'm breaking them into tiles and i'm I'm able to generate my most recent one is 12k. So like really high res super detailed things that are as much emergent prompt based as they are hand painted and manipulated.
[01:00:43.850] Kent Bye: Now, are you able to train the disco diffusion or stable diffusion on your own art?
[01:00:49.771] Kevin Mack: I haven't been able to I'm sure it's possible. Although The big thing with most neural networks, and there are exceptions, there are specialized networks for training unlimited data, but without a whole lot of data, it's hard to get much out of. They tend to just give you back something out of the training data rather than an interesting synthesis.
[01:01:12.814] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that, you know, the way that it's coming up with these larger features and the fusion of different archetypal forms or concepts, I think was the real power for me, at least when I was playing with the journey of like taking a mushroom and making it into a house and to take the architecture of a house and to take the architecture of a mushroom and to kind of create these mashups of these ideas. I think that's where, for me at least, that's where a lot of the really interesting things were, but it's hard to really compose an entire scene with the details of the framing and the depth and everything. It seemed to be, at least with my experiments with it, kind of limited with being able to control the placement of certain objects in certain spaces, but it was able to take two large ideas and combine them in a really interesting and compelling way.
[01:01:54.758] Kevin Mack: I think that is, for me, that's its most interesting and powerful strength, is the amalgamation of ideas, which, in a sense, it's weakness. It's not very good at discretizing ideas or concepts. So if you ask for Superman and a gorilla standing in a parking lot, you get some weird fusion of Superman and a gorilla. You don't get Superman and a gorilla, which is actually really interesting. For me, that's what's cool. Some people want to know, what kind of a prompt could you come up with that generated this image? For me, the real trick with that is I'm building very complex prompts that there's nothing in the prompt that you see in the image. It's just I'm manipulating the AI to create something that is my vision which is about this notion of totally abstract things that are somehow recognizable with very realistic lighting and textures. So it's always this thing. For me, I was a completely abstract artist and a completely photoreal artist. And I like the idea of combining those two things so that you have this photoreal experience of something that doesn't exist and yet feels very recognizable. It has elements, shapes, essences of things we know and that are familiar, and yet you can't find any of it in there.
[01:03:28.532] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know that Mark Zuckerberg and Meta, they've already demonstrated a world within Meta Horizon where he was saying these different objects and they were invoking it. At that point, it was very simple and it wasn't very complex, and the types of experiential design wasn't all that interesting. I love how when you go into mid-journey, when you give it just a poetic prompt and then it just blows your mind of like, how did it come up with that from that? It just is able to translate these concepts or ideas and you give it just enough to create something that's totally original and totally mind-blowing. To think about how that type of prompt engineering might be applied to the construction of immersive and spatial worlds, I think it'll be interesting to see if, like you said, there's a kind of a look and feel for each of these different trainings of both the DALI and Mid-Journey and Disco Diffusion and Stable Diffusion. They all have their look and feel and essential character, I'd say, of their aesthetic. And so, yeah, just the same way of as you start to translate that into 3D objects and 3D aesthetics, then some of the worlds that you've been creating, you're really leaning into that more abstractions. You start to see some of the AI-generated stuff. It starts to be like, it's okay of generating some novelty, but then it hits a hard wall of really going into something that's truly original or truly groundbreaking in some ways. There's always going to be a role for that human creativity, but AI-assisted creativity, especially when you start to use the AI to be a launching point, like you said, that you're going in and tweaking the different photos and controlling the exact composition or the textures of the images that you're getting out of this, but it's a great starting point. And so I imagine there's going to be something very similar as we start to go into these immersive VR spaces and use the same type of generative adversarial network to generate entire worlds. So yeah, it'll start to get really interesting.
[01:05:19.607] Kevin Mack: Yeah, I think it'll get far more. I think it's moving fast now and I expect You know, some of these are already, in a sense, multimodal in that there are multiple networks and so on that are interacting. And that's what brains are. So pretty quick here, we get executive command modules that are controlling multiple neural networks and so on and are trained on understanding quantities or are trained on understanding discrete things and will develop language for communicating with the networks to say, you know, I want Superman discrete object and a gorilla discrete object in a parking lot, and you'll be able to define things. Already, you know, with Dolly 2, it's very good at at least with just one or two objects, like it can do a pretty good job. It just looks like a photograph, you just believe it. You get more than that, it starts getting weird, you know, you get the, you know, there's a bear and a fish and a parrot walk into a bar, and yeah, you don't really get that. You get something kind of weird. But I think the ability to control it will definitely probably increase exponentially. Getting in to generate 3D stuff, for me, that's a little bit of a head scratcher, just because it seems like that's a much harder problem than 2D images. You know, it's a whole other dimension. And also, just the massive availability of tagged training data that's on the internet for 2D images is incredible. Whereas for 3D data, it's not quite the same resources available for that. But the whole thing is the neural networks, the people developing them, they're really smart and they come up with these amazing ways to solve problems that seem intractable. Yeah, I think they'll figure it out here before long.
[01:07:16.442] Kent Bye: Yeah. I know there's a lot of debates around whether or not these AI language models or these trained networks, whether or not they could exhibit consciousness. I'm personally more on the skeptical side on that side, just in the sense that I do suspect there might be a need for a biological substrate for consciousness to exist. If you look at the traditional naturalistic aspects of consciousness being an epiphenomena of the brain in the more of a reductive materialist way, then I'm certainly skeptical. But if you start to look at more of the panpsychic or idealism where if we live in a world that is all mental or all mind or if in every aspect of matter has a little bit of consciousness, then it does start to get a little interesting for me at least of how because there is a statistical probability as you give the prompt, it's going to be different every time. And so there's an element of chance. And so to what degree is your intention and your mind somehow potentially interacting with that statistical process? Very similar to say the I Ching where Carl Jung has written about in the introduction of the translation of the I Ching of how as you're casting the I Ching, and you have a question in your mind. And so is there some sort of interaction with the mind, with the I Ching in that divinatory practice and the larger context of Chinese philosophy? So just the same, is there some type of consciousness interaction that we have with these probabilistic interactions with these AI neural networks that we've imbue our intention with these words, but through some combination, we're able to generate these images because they're going to be different every time. So there's no real way to falsify what's actually happening. But yeah, there's a part of me that's resistant to that discussion around consciousness and AI. And I do suspect there may be some need for a biological substrate. But at the same time, with the more panpsychic and idealistic interpretations of consciousness, then there could be some element in which that we're engaging with these technologies on a very deep level.
[01:09:10.501] Kevin Mack: I recommend you embrace both of those points of view. All of the points of view you can muster, because I think they're all true. and all false as well. So yeah, I think with consciousness, the one thing that really bugs me is this idea of some magic threshold at which life or intelligence becomes conscious. It's kind of ridiculous. Like, oh, humans are conscious, but dogs aren't. It's like, OK, well, now that's the kind of like, no, that's not quite right. So OK, so humans and dogs and dolphins and monkeys, but not bugs. Bugs aren't conscious." I was like, yeah, all right, well that seems pretty arbitrary to me. But yeah, I think the, you know, panpsychism kind of has a bad rep because it's kind of this mystical thing, right? But it's actually, now it's emerging in physics and stuff as really kind of the underlying idea behind it, in that it's a spectrum, it's a continuum. Everything is consciousness. That's what it is. That's what infinity is. That's what it all is. On some level, that's It just is. But is disco diffusion conscious? I don't know. Is your retina conscious? Is your visual cortex conscious? Kind of, a little. On some level, a thermostat is self-aware. It knows what temperature it is and stuff. It reacts based on input. It has an input and output, and it processes one to the other. So it has like one degree of consciousness. We have trillions. So we're not really a lot like a thermostat. A thermostat isn't a lot like us in terms of consciousness. And it is reasonable to say, yeah, that thermostat's not conscious, but it kind of is. And so I think it's really going to be helpful for people to just start thinking of it on a spectrum, on a continuum. It's all conscious, but the difference between our consciousness and the consciousness of a rock are very, very different things. And currently, the consciousness that we have as humans, or even animals have, is a very, very different thing than the very limited consciousness that these very simple neural networks or AIs that we're working with have. But they're a lot more conscious than a thermostat.
[01:11:39.531] Kent Bye: Yeah. Certainly, the debates around consciousness are going to be never-ending, because there's certain metaphysical things about it that are not really falsifiable. So we can't really test it or tell for sure. So it'll be a perennial question for a long time. But I know it's been a part of the larger discourse. And I just wanted to flag it and bring you up here as we start to wrap up. But yeah, just as a final question, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and these immersive spaces and the future of AI, AI-assisted art and consciousness might be and what it might be able to enable.
[01:12:13.926] Kevin Mack: Well, I'm ready for you this time, Kent. You've asked me every time you've interviewed me, and it always caught me by surprise. I always forgot to think about it beforehand. So anyway, what I've come up with this time is that the ultimate potential of this stuff is transcendence, of the limitations of physical reality and human nature. I think for us, if we can get past our limitations in the physical world, scarcity and survival of the fittest and the struggle to survive in conflict and so on, I think VR is going to help us do that. And I also think that we've got this hardwired human nature stuff, some of it very good, but some of it really destructive and bad. you know, greed and selfishness are just, they're hardwired. That's how we've survived for as long as we have, over eons from time we were little single-celled things. So to overcome that will require self-engineering. We will have to transcend our physical limitations and the meat in order to, I think, overcome those things. And I think AI will be very helpful in doing that for us. The AI will come up with, we're already becoming integrated with AI. When I work with the AI to make art, it's like, we're like one together. We're like vibing, we're like communicating, and it's a two-way thing. It's really amazing. So, I think as AI becomes exponentially more powerful and more effective, I'm hoping it can help us to overcome our human nature, the darker side of human nature.
[01:13:56.818] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Namu Anki is going to be a public world throughout the course of the Venice Immersive Festival from September 1st to 10th. Are you planning on, have you decided whether or not to keep it as a public world after that time or not?
[01:14:10.469] Kevin Mack: Well, my father taught me something that I found valuable throughout my life, he said, never make a decision until you have to. But he said, it's very important to know when you have to, and when you have to, you make that decision. So I haven't really decided. I'll probably just leave it open, just because it's fun. But who knows, maybe the International Institute of galactic virtual reality artificial intelligences will come to me and beg me to keep it private for another special event or two.
[01:14:50.591] Kent Bye: Private or public, it could go either way.
[01:14:52.773] Kevin Mack: Yeah, exactly. Who knows? It's a very mysterious organization I serve, and I really don't know much about them, but I try to do my best for them.
[01:15:02.300] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[01:15:06.372] Kevin Mack: Well, I hope everybody will check out Namu Anki. And I guess I say the same thing I generally say, love is groovy and be positive.
[01:15:17.576] Kent Bye: Awesome. Kevin, thanks.
[01:15:18.836] Kevin Mack: And be kind to these AIs. Don't be dissing them. They're our best hope for salvation here.
[01:15:25.808] Kent Bye: Yeah, and there are a lot of opportunities to get a little bit of a psychedelic trip for these visions that you're providing for each of these entities. And so, yeah, I really enjoyed going through this world with you and to be able to see what was really a compelling spatial journey that took me through these portals. And like you said, going and having these virtual experiences that transcend what you can do in physical reality. And I feel like that some of the stuff that you're doing here, starting to tap into those different types of deeper archetypal experiences and these engagement with these mythic entities, I think is really powerful to be able to create a space that can be very contemplated for people to go just on their own and discover not only these different places and nooks and crannies that you've created, but also these interactions with these AI entities that you have within Namu Anki. So yeah, Kevin, again, thanks again for joining me today and helping unpack it all.
[01:16:16.728] Kevin Mack: Very good. Thank you. I think that's the main thing that I learned from doing the tours with you was that I'm doing tours, so you kind of got to keep moving and go through all the things. But I think the world was really designed for just hanging out, quiet contemplation, peaceful exploration, and discovery. So I would encourage people to just check it out.
[01:16:39.714] Kent Bye: Awesome. Thanks so much. Thank you. So that was Kevin Mack. He's a virtual reality artist who creates these abstract and surreal art within a number of different virtual platforms. And this year, he has a piece called Namu Anki, which is being featured in the Venice Immersive Competition, and it's available on VRChat for at least the next 10 days from September 1st to September 10th. So I've a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, I was really curious to hear about Kevin's process as he's creating these worlds, because as you're in the worlds, then they look a lot different from a lot of the other worlds that I go into. There's a lot of unique geometries that he has, but also textures. Not as much of the dynamic shaders that you see in something like Bluortasia or in Anandala, but I think this experience is a lot more about going through these different spaces that he's created and interacting with these different deities. I'd recommend taking a look at the map and to see that there's actually like this portal at the bottom of the ocean that is definitely worth checking out. As he took me on the tour, we kind of looked around and then at the end of it, after we hit all these other spots and hit all the other deities and there's these little boxes that you can click on to get the visions from the different blorts. And as you go into those underground, into the ice world and then the lava world and then come back up, yeah, that creates a full loop. And yeah, it's a contemplative place. So I'd recommend going there either by yourself or with other people, since it is a social VR world now to kind of explore around and I think it's quite interesting to see his aesthetic and look and style and bringing it into VRChat. And the whole dimensions for how he engages with these entities from the future, like I was saying, and we were talking about this whole paradoxical nature of not really knowing the true nature of reality itself or even consciousness. And so as he's having these experiences that are transcending the domains of space and time, then It's either a story that he's putting together for what this is, or he's actually in engagement and talking to these extra-dimensional entities that are somehow transcending the space and time and sending back information. Yeah, whatever is happening, I think it's your own artistic process and following your own intuition. creating a virtual representation of these different entities and this idea that you're trying to be in connection to something that's happening in the future and that you're trying to build these virtual platforms to cultivate a reality that doesn't quite exist yet. So, if you go back to the previous conversations that I've had with Kevin and Blartesha and Anandala, this has been a consistent theme where he's talking about this as a part of his own artistic practice. Yeah, I really appreciated the paradoxical framing of the pluralism of both and where you hold loosely a lot of these different ideas and to not be so fixed and firmed into one state or mode of the nature of reality and I think there's a lot of common that are happening within the context of AI. There was the Google engineer who got freaked out that the language learning model he thought was conscious. I don't suspect that things like that are conscious, but it all depends upon your philosophical orientation about what the nature of consciousness actually is. If we think about it as a purely naturalistic epiphenomenon of the physical materiality, then, yeah, I don't think there's much argument there to be made for these AI learning language models have any degree of consciousness. They're just kind of repeating, in a widely cited paper, the stochastic parrots of just repeating statistical patterns of how languages order to each other, and it doesn't have any deeper meaning behind that. Similar thing with the general adversarial networks and the process of images. I think the difference is that there's a certain amount of statistical chance that happens when you are generating these prompts that it's actually different each and every time because of that statistical process and so is there some degree of our intentions or our Consciousness that is operating and at some sort of subtle level again there's research that's been done by the Institute of nomadic sciences that looks at the Wigner von Neumann interpretation where you can actually have some consciousness that's collapsing the wave function This is more frontier science that has some evidence, but it's not been widely replicated or accepted within the broader scientific community So but there's lots of different other models of idealism and panpsychism and so when you start to look at those other more exotic or cutting-edge frameworks for consciousness then panpsychism, everything has a certain degree of consciousness, then Tononi has the integrated information theory of consciousness, which is a little bit of what Kevin was alluding to in terms of this spectrum of having things that have a certain degree of information integration, and the more complicated information integration, then the more complex of different types of consciousness that can happen. That's a little bit of what Tononi is saying with this integrated information theory of consciousness, which is somewhat compatible with some of the different panpsychic ideas. So these questions around consciousness the nature of consciousness and they'll be perennial questions because I don't think we'll ever fully solve them but there is a bit of this moving into these alchemical magical casting of spells as you try to conjure up the right word combinations and it's really the right moment at the right time to be able to get the the image that you're trying to get. And there's a little bit of iteration that happens there. So it's kind of interesting, this prompt engineering process, it feels like you're a little bit of a wizard of trying to come up with the right combination of words to get exactly what you want. And so for Kevin, he didn't find that a lot of the existing tools were giving him the types of freedom that he wanted to have as an artist. And so he's doing a little bit more of the stable diffusion or disco diffusion that allows a little bit more freedom to be able to control it and for him to go in and edit and composite these things together. So It's a little bit of this collaboration between the AI and this generation. For some people, they can just use the stock Midjourney and DALI to be able to create a lot of these different images. I spent a couple of weeks just playing with it pretty intensely, and it's really quite fun. I can't think of another type of technology that has spurred so much creativity in my own expression. It's really liberating to be able to have a thought or idea and to see something that's generated. Also a certain look and feel that you can start to see like oh, yeah That definitely looks like that was created by mid journey or created by Dali Eventually, I'm sure that each of these different systems will be able to have adding different styles and different prompts to be able to tune it So that's not so distinct as a specific aesthetic but some people also really appreciate that as aesthetic because it does have a little bit of an opinion so Anyway, it was really interesting to hear Kevin elaborate on that a little bit as he's been thinking about this stuff since the 90s and as part of his own current artistic practice that he's exploring. I expect it also to be a part of, like he said, the Holodeck, which is, yeah, of course, when you're there and you want to conjure up something, you're able to say the right phrase and the right words and create a whole immersive experience and eventually, potentially, a whole immersive story that's unfolding, as well. We'll see how sophisticated these AI machines are able to get in terms of understanding story and replicating story. Even just to do from 2D to 3D, it does 2D pretty well because there's so much data to be trained on, but like Kevin said, there's not as much 3D immersive data. But as time goes on, then there'll be more and more of these immersive worlds that are training the AI to be able to more quickly generate these different types of worlds. There was some demo that Mark Zuckerberg had demoed, and that was before the whole AI art, GAN revolution, started to really come into the consumer scale over the last number of months this year. It'll be curious to see if they announce anything like that at Oculus Connect. I imagine that the tool sets and all that stuff would have lots of different applications when it comes into Horizon Worlds, and actually would probably make it a lot more compelling to go into Horizon Worlds to create some of those different experiences. We'll see if they have a little bit more of those technologies integrated as you move forward. The voice activated, just being able to create and manifest something just by speaking out those words. It does remind me a lot of this kind of magical wizard and the kind of alchemical fusion of combining all these different things together, and you never really know what's going to happen, and you just have to iterate quite a bit, which Kevin is saying is very similar to his procedural process as an artist. Always love catching up with Kevin and seeing his latest work and so highly recommend checking out Nama on key over the next 10 days or so within VR chat and then yeah by the time you're listening to this I'll be already in Venice seeing all these different other experiences and when I get back after the September 5th Then I'll start to air a little bit more of my coverage of what's been happening at the Venice immersive. I So, that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue bringing this coverage. So, become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
