This concept of the hypercanvas seems still pretty useful to me, even a few days later.

One of the issues here, which I also started butting up against in my visual explorations for Midjourney handheld controllers, is that when you are operating in higher-dimensional spaces, you start to have difficulty mapping those to lower dimensional spaces, like the ones we visually are used to, for example.

There’s always data that gets thrown out in the dimensional reduction, and in one sense, this is the core challenge of any art: how to meaningfully reduce the dimensions, while still retaining the prime experience.

As I was mentioning earlier, I’m feeling constrained by AI tools lately, rather than empowered. I hit them pretty hard the past year, so that’s only understandable. There are a few cases I want to delve into why that is, but the relevant one here we can see plainly enough in the below attempts at getting Midjourney to depict hypercanvases, and higher dimensional spaces, using 2D, 3D, and 4D (time) within a pictorial object.

Here’s the Imgur page with the full set and no commentary, btw. On with some pictures:

If I remember correctly, this one was the result of one or two zoom outs, which sometimes yield interesting results in MJ. I need to play with that more. (Have an upcoming post on that in fact).

I like this idea of a hypercanvas as being a kind of chaotic “weird” geometry of a city. Many of the depictions here present a hypercanvas as a real, virtual, or mixed space, which one could presumably physically or at least visually navigate through:

This is a variation on that landscape concept which I might call something like “Annotated Landscape” or perhaps map or legend view, with objects in the landscape broken down through UI into component entities, explorable, mutable, a model of a corresponding world, which changes as you manipulate it:

A big ass pyramid, because it looks epic and big, like your storyverse of hypercanvas might be huge and need a lot of magical space and energy and shit to hold all your stuff…

A more technical or almost futuristic encyclopedic user interface for accessing a storyworld, or exploring parts of a hypercanvas, and nearby neighbors in higher dimensional space.

I just think this one of the guy with some kind of light stylus drawing this complicated hypercanvas mandala on a physical board… Feels very right to me somehow.

This one goes in the direction of hypercanvas as art installation or massive sculpture you can walk into sort of thing:

And this one below I really love, because it has this sort of like… quality of something. The love of the amateur, the hobbyist, who spends all their free time building this little world, and taking care of it. Gardening the imagination:

Reminds me almost of like a model train set or something. Perhaps using the holographic table or whatever it is he has, you can open up different worlds, landscapes, scenes, items, entities, etc. And “do stuff” with them. Cool stuff…

Something about this one makes sense, so I kept it. Maybe I’ll do another post on its variants, not included here for brevity’s sake.

File under futuristic high tech complicated interface looking thing. Maybe this is one of the many multi-modal ways you could interact with a hypercanvas?

This one is fun. Speaks again to the sort of toy world, day-dreamy aspect of the hypercanvas. Hypercanvas as paracosm…

A paracosm is a detailed imaginary world thought generally to originate in childhood. The creator of a paracosm has a complex and deeply felt relationship with this subjective universe, which may incorporate real-world or imaginary characters and conventions. Commonly having its own geography, history, and language, it is an experience that is often developed during childhood and continues over a long period of time, months or even years, as a sophisticated reality that can last into adulthood.

One last one:

I like that this one has a sort of augmented/mixed reality vibe to it. Almost like something that could be made in Adobe Aero and embedded in a physical location. I imagine all that has to be part of hypercanvases too, how they interpenetrate with IRL reality….

Anyway, this doesn’t really get me to where I sense intuitively I could end up in understanding the hypercanvas and where it could take me visually. But one step at a time as we enter these new worlds and new dimensions…

One final one for real: a device for seeing hypercanvases:

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