Making Worlds: Art, Words and Worlds

Making Borders, Making Worlds

On a wintry night, sixty-year-old Gulya was preparing to cross the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan border.1 Although she had made this once simple journey countless times in her life, this would be her final and most dangerous attempt. The decision to undertake it had effectively been made for her by the recent leveling of the home in which she had lived with her husband for some forty years. It was dest...

Worlds Without Words

This paper points out a deficiency in virtual worlds as they are envisioned today. Several of the more important aspects of human communicative behavior are missing, since there is no way to accommodate natural linguistic interaction with and through the interface. We point out some explicit cases where natural language interaction would be useful in a VR framework, and identify some areas wher...

Worlds Before and Beyond Words

The advent of computer-generated environments for simulating experience of the real world invites a reappraisal of the role of classical and neo-classical theories of computation (e.g. views of computation based on linguistic and logical frameworks). To make more effective use of computers in connection with Virtual Reality requires a shift in emphasis towards computers as state representers ra...

Fighting Words and Antagonistic Worlds

Metaphor is a fundamentally antagonistic way of viewing and describing the world. Metaphors ask us to see what is not there, so as to remake the world to our own liking and to suit our own lexicons. But if metaphors clash with the world as it is, they can also clash with each other. Each metaphor represents a stance from which to view a topic, and though some stances are mutually compatible, ma...

Making Decisions in Large Worlds