la caverna #18

la caverna deals with the impossibility of seeing the absolute truth given our subjective minds and our subjective world. The title is a tribute to Plato’s allegory of the Cave, included in his work Republic. It does not only deal with the fact that what we perceive is affected by our senses and our mental state, which is a function of our genetic inheritance plus our life experiences, current and past, but it also is a reflection of today’s world, where a fabricated reality is no longer distinguishable from what it really is. What is reality today?

The artwork creates a set of basic volumes, inspired in the platonic forms, which represent a potential ideal reality. It then presents a distorted view of that reality through several steps of distortion. The artwork also presents, in separate tokens, the undistorted reality and a representation of the layer that transforms that reality into what the observer can see in the first token. The two tokens that represent these other elements will be available to redeem for free at a later stage to collectors who own the first piece (this token) at the time of claiming the rest of the triptych. The three tokens are included in the price of the first token’s mint.

The artwork allows to refine the view (simulating more light, creating stronger images) pressing "r". You can save the current image pressing "s". You can decrease/increase the resolution appending in live view the URL parameter ?globalResK=2 (for example). By default, globalResK is 1. You can go as high as your graphics card can handle.

Made with vanilla javascript and glsl, no additional libraries or external dependencies. Thanks to @greggman @iquilezles @piterpasma for sharing knowledge about webgl and raymarching. I hope I know something someday to share that little bit.

Tested to work fine on Chrome, Safari, Brave on macos, Chrome, Safari, Firefox iOS, Edge Windows. Firefox macos fails to render the image correctly. Please check before you purchase.