I have been involved with oudeis for well over a year and at this moment I
do not know the answer to this question! Obviously, there are ideas,
concepts and plans thrown together in some sort of amalgamation but there
is no overall coherency to this thing I once called an amorphic beast. If
oudeis is ever going to escape the metaphoric clutches of Poseidon,
decisions, hard decisions, must be made. As every surfer knows, if a shark
stops moving forward it will drown from lack of oxygen. I think the same
is now true for oudeis.
There is a plan, a very good plan, presently put forward by Juli Burk who
obviously has put a lot of time and thought into it. But I strongly
believe that before this plan can be implemented certain things MUST be
decided. Otherwise, we will have teams and team leaders but no direction.
Oudeis will be nothing more than a rudderless ship stuck on a sandbar of
indecision.
On Sat, 13 Dec 1997 05:25:29 +0100 (MET) Mon wrote about next tuesdays meeting:
>agenda: positioning, delegating responsibilities (team leaders), team
>building, common agree to a time plan (next 6 month or until freiburg)
With all respect to Mon who I think has done an amazing job keeping this
thing alive, even when it barely had a pulse. I think that before we pick
teams, team leaders, and even time plans, there are more important things
that must take precedence on the agenda, for if these things are not
decided first a lot of time and effort will be thrown away and oudeis will
be incapable of making progress.
Now, let me state quite clearly that I am quite willing to work with Mon on
the script. However, I want to make sure that her time, my time, and the
time of all other participants is not wasted. I say this because if these
decisions are not made it will impact every team in Juli's plan. We NEED a
clear idea of where we are going and what we are doing, not generalities,
not vague statements, and not wishful thinking.
These decisions involve several different matters that I will raise in
individual mails for easier digestion and also because I am very busy at
the moment and occasionally need sleep ;-). The first is the matter of the
light cones:
LIGHT CONES - After all of this time (two years?) the concept of the light
cones has gone untested by oudeis, not even one simple test involving a
single light has been done. But, what we recently have discovered, thanks
to Cat, is that this concept is not new or untested (see Cat's last mail).
Cat ran a number of detailed tests on this concept of using light cones as
representations of actors. The results, which he wrote about in his
letter, showed them to be impractical, undramatic and generally less than
desirable. Given the fact that we have not run our own tests, all we have
to go on is Cat's. He seems to have done a very thorough job and given the
complete absence of information on our end I feel that we have no choice
but to accept his conclusions. If anyone disagrees with his conclusions,
then our own tests should be done immediately to see if this idea is still
feasible. However, we are clearly at the point where a decision has to be
made whether to go forward with light cones or drop them. This is a
central component of oudeis and it impacts how the script is to be written,
it also impacts the work of the technical staff (do we have a technical
staff?), as well as the production staff. If oudeis is to go forward (?) a
decision on this must be made IMMEDIATELY.
Other matters that also impact how the proposed teams will function and
that need decisions will be addressed in upcoming mails. These include:
*Biological sensors.
*Global venues (RLs).
*Assembled text from Cook's translation.
*Choros.
*MOO
Again, I strongly believe that decisions involving these matters must be
made before ANYTHING else can even hope to be accomplished! Maybe by
tuesday we can begin to address these issues so that when teams are
eventually organized and time schedules set, we will have a westerly breeze
in our sails and will not have to endure any longer the painful rowing that
plagued the good companions of Odysseus after he left the island of Aeolia
for a second and last time.
Lee