The reason I love videogames, I think, is that every few years they absolutely flatten me.
They destroy my sense of what’s possible and replace it with something new and weird.
Impossible Mission did this back on the Commodore 64 - a game, but so stylish, so transporting!
This chain of little explosions never really ended, but maybe it did slow down a bit.
The sheer visual delight ofJet Set Radio.
And more recently, VR.
VR absolutely astonished me.
And yet I didn’t expect it to.
But when Oculus arrived in our office I found myself itching to unpack it.
And it turned out VR wasn’t a tech thing at all.
Tech had allowed for something toylike and - that word again - transporting.
Listen: do you know at what point I was won over?
There was no period of deciding to be won over, no slow caving.
Instead, Oculus came with a sort of starter sequence of places it took you to visit.
One of those, I can almost imagine it fading in now.
I’m high above a comic book city, standing on some kind of gantry.
I look up and the skyscrapers only continue higher into the clouds.
And moving over the cold night above, maybe an airship.
That sense of being up so high.
And it wasn’t just that as I turned my head my view of the world turned around me.
It was everything - the distant traffic, the hint of wind.
I was at my desk, but I was also…
You know what happened next.
Great games and great hardware, but VR remained niche.
It was a wire problem, a storage problem, a not-wanting-to-wear-a-bucket-in-your-living-room problem.
VR feels beloved today, but beloved by a few, It’s Twin Peaks rather than Lost.
It’s the Backroom Boys.
It’s a club you’re a member of or you aren’t.
And I thought of that bittersweet future twice this week.
Twice because… Well.
How to put it.
A new room appeared in my house.
Never forget, I tell myself, that VR always starts by ushering you into darkness.
A thrilling kind of darkness, potent, expectant.
It’s the darkness of the theatre.
And this new room in my house is dark, too.
Dark and almost formless, a space I emerge in with a palette and paintbrush in hand.
I don’t have Oculus anymore, so the city diorama is out of reach.
Job Simulator has that brilliant exit burrito, but I’ve always been clumsy with the game itself.
Something else was needed.
Ultimately, Tilt Brush struck me as the perfect place to start with VR for my friend.
This is underheard of with VR in our house.
But Tilt Brush is just too good.
Tilt Brush is an art package and a Google product.
But unlike a lot of Google products it doesn’t feel rushed or compromised.
One controller is a palette - of colours, but also brushes, tools, menus.
The other is your brush.
You paint in the 3D space you start in, your lines and arc taking and holding the air.
It’s instantly comprehensible.
I’m not near my desk anymore, I’m somewhere dark and cool and promising.
It’s thinking room.
It’s a study.
It’s somewhere new and necessary in my house.
In other words, I spend a lot of time in Tilt Brush just being in Tilt Brush.
That’s not to say I don’t do art.
It’s hard not to do art.
One day I drew a flower in gummy pink paste, and then washed in a flat background.
The picture needed a frame which I drew in lightning around it.
Then I signed my name in neon tubes.
Terrible art, but so tangible!
Look Tilt Brush up on Youtube and TikTok and you see a lot of this.
Not lighthouses, specifically, but people making spaces for themselves to spend time in.
Over the last few days, I’ve done something a little different though.
you’re able to import reference images into Tilt Brush.
Nieto is a man, and Velazquez has painted his head and shoulders so that he is man-sized.
On Chrome or in books this is a striking painting of intelligence and scrutiny at peace.
It’s almost a form of time travel.
And in Tilt Brush I can recreate this.
I hang the picture and I stand before it.
I am back in Apsley House, back with Nieto, on his terms, on his scale.
I am back in his space.
You give yourself to someone else’s space.
I have been to Apsley House and the National, been to Madrid to see his paintings.
But Tilt Brush, yesterday, let me get that little bit closer.
And then I sit down and think for a bit.
And then I start to paint.
