Jonathan Edwards on the fullness of images in the world

"I expect by very ridicule and contempt to be called a man of a fruitful brain and copious fancy, but they are welcome to it. I am not ashamed to own that I believe that the whole universe, heaven and earth, air and seas, and the divine constitution and history of the holy Scriptures, be full of images of divine things, as full as language is of words; and that the multitudes of those things that I have mentioned are but a very small part of what is really intended to be signified and typified by those things."

-Jonathan Edwards (as quoted in The Supreme Harmony of All )

Shaun Tan on the fundumental strangeness of reality

"Everything is really fundamentally mysterious. In learning to recognize meaning and familiarize ourselves with our everyday world — to make sense of it all, and manage our lives — we tend to overlook this basic fact. Things become familiar, obvious, self-evident. For me, the practice of drawing and writing is an opportunity to consider what is otherwise, to look at certain objects, qualities, and situations at length and interrogate them to the point where you can appreciate their fundamental strangeness, or uniqueness. Art is about getting to that point of stopping and examining something for long enough that you actually see how unique and weird it is."

-Shaun Tan interview in Locus Magazine

Tan is a new favorite of mine, his recent book The Arrival is an absolutely beautiful wordless novel about a man immigrating to a new place. He does an amazing job showing the reader what it is like to be immersed in a forign culture with a different language, and a different way of life. By creating a world that is slightly fantastic, he lets us realize how strange our own world is when we are new to it.


Related posts:
Richard Vander Wende on the Fantasy of Reality

david lynch on worldbuilding in film and nature and culture

"A sense of place is so critical in cinema, because you want to go into another worl. Every story has it's own world, and it's own feel, and it's own mood. So you try to put together all these things-these little details-to create that sense of place."

"When you see an aging building or a rusted bridge, you are seeing nature and man working together. If you paint over a building, there is no more magic to that building. But if it's allowed to age, then man has built it and nature has added to it-it's so organic.

But often people wouldn't think to permit that, except for scenic designers."

-David Lynch in Catching the Big Fish

my first (and so far only) foray into worldbuilding

My interest in worldbuilding and storytelling, my love of reading and drawing and my desire to be a film maker all go back to an old computer game called Myst. These are some images of a myst inspired world I made about 6 years ago.

See more images of Vynclif here in this post at my sketch blog.

Here are my myst related blog posts.

worldbuilding, storytelling and atheism

"Atheists can write perfectly good and realistic fiction, because there is nothing about being an atheist that prohibits a person from understanding human motivation and the physical world. But being nonreligious does deprive you of the one thing an ambitious fantasy author needs: a plausible cosmology, a myth that tells us how things got to be the way they are. The great religions all provide this. One could even hold, as did Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, that a religion is just a story of the world, which in the case of Christianity (they held) happens to be true. A Christian fantasist in his act of subcreation can borrow heavily from the true mythic world created by the Christian God; the fantasist might change some of the names and other details, but the basic infinitely rich story has already been told.

The nonreligious fantasy author is forced to play the mythmaker twice, as it were. He has to develop a cosmology of the way the world really is, the nonreligious account that re­ places the account given by the religions he rejects. And he has to write the fantasy story, obeying all the rules of the larger account and then creating his own world within it."

-Daniel P. Moloney, in this article about the His Dark Materials books

Wisdom on Worldbuilding

“The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of old.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth,
before he had made the earth with its fields,
or the first of the dust of the world.
When he established the heavens, I was there;
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master workman,
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the children of man."

-The Lady Wisdom in Proverbs 8

When I read this last week, I was surprised how much it reminded me of something out of Tolkien's Silmarillion. Of course, as as secular Rings fans are always quick to point out, Tolkien "despised allegory", but also in Tolkien's own terms, "We make still by the law in which we're made." Tolkien, like me, you and the secular Lord of the Rings fans live in a God-made world of symbols and they themselves are self-portraits of the Worldbuilder. The connections are necessarily there.

two of my favorite artists on inspiration and notes on sub-creation

"Imagination cannot function in a vacuum...The value of information and knowledge, visual or other, is the time it spends kicking around inside one's head. Despite the mice and the abandoned nests under the eaves, the mind is not an idle place, where things are stored away collecting dust. They talk to each other, exchange information, get together, make groups and friends, and eventually are there when you are doing the one thing you can NOT do consciously - be inspired."

-John Howe in RAVENS, RHINOS, RUINS & RUST*



*(this is a blog post where he talks about his artist's morgue, something I was first introduced to in the excellent book Digital Texturing and Painting)



"For an artist to create something completely original is impossible; there really isn't such a thing as something that is completely original, but it's very possible and sometimes very powerful to combine existing elements into a new whole. This is what an artist does: Ingest the world around him or her and regurgitate it, putting it back together into something that is familiar, yet unfamiliar; normal yet magical. I can cite examples of resources that proved to be an inspiration for us, but really those resources inspired us in very superficial ways. We've been "ingesting" since we were born, and what comes out now is the sum of our entire lives."

-Robyn Miller in an interview in Digital Space: Designing Virtual Environment

Besides inspiration, Miller refers what Tolkien (who influence both of these artists) called sub-creation: our created worlds are secondary within God's created world, thus never truly original. Ignoring this I think is why so much modern art is so ugly and poor. (edit: I have a post on this here.)

Also, the other day I stumbled upon this excellent article that sums up and explores a lot of things I am interested in about Worldbuilding as Storytelling, etc:

Sub-creation of Secondary Game Worlds:

"In order to sub-create a vivid world, I suggest that the game designers need to focus more on the philosophical, mythological, and religious cultural aspects of their world, rather than focusing on naïve quests. Not neglecting quests though, a believable game world requires naïve and epic adventures as well as cosmological inter-linkage between ideas. The game designer as sub-creator must want to say something with their world, and these messages are the basis of the cosmological level of the game world. They do not have to be didactic or moralizing, but the content ought to move the players emotionally as well as sensibly or rationally."

-Lars Konzack,
(who incedently has a blog I just discovered here.)

...and in order to make this post sufficiently ramblesome, there are many parallels between that essay and Ernest Adam's Will Computer Games Ever be a Legitiment Art Form.