Emailing a friend about the "new VR/3D" stuff rearing its head in net art circles:
I like some of it as raw material but none of the art sites you mentioned. "Future kitsch" is exactly right but is that how it's being treated? Is the uncanny valley a problem or just something we live with? Just because someone made a "phat" effect does that mean it needs to be used?
I like seeing that stuff on Dump because the attitude is no one really gives a crap about it. When people put it on overdesigned sites and call it their art I have a problem with it. I even think I have more respect for "generative" artists because they are hunkered down in a genre doing experiments. Whereas something like Paintfx.biz* hasn't figured out its stance yet. Pretty sure at least one of the members is embarrassed by the "popping huge boners over juicy gestural marks" rhetoric but won't publicly distance himself from it.
A few months ago Duncan Alexander signed into Active Worlds, a proto-Second Life from the '90s and took a tour. This is a virtual kitsch-o-rama but no user of the site then or now thinks of it as such. Maybe we need to have a conversation about the old future kitsch before getting deeply into the new. (Back in the '90s Miltos Manetas was pushing Active Worlds as a place to have virtual art commerce and such, with "name" galleries buying cyber-real estate. This same paradigm was recycled for Second Life with zero historical memory.)
See also abstract illusionism then and now.
posthuman nightmare image above posted to dump.fm by mat3i
dump links not viewable on Internet Explorer
*Am still on the fence about Paintfx.biz. Seems like the wrong way to go but would welcome either (a) a self-serving Brad Troemel-like pseudo-history explaining that all of art was leading up to what they're doing or (b) an explanation that they actually dislike both abstract expressionism and software that bulks up brushstrokes into gelatinous 3D blobs. Are they like Depthcore? Why not?