Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0709112357280.7476@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Notes for a talk on 'human modeling'
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 23:57:42 -0400 (EDT)
Notes for a talk on 'human modeling' Human Modeling - including 'sex girlfriend modeling,' analog modeling, avatar modeling and governance issues, technical skin/fabrication issues, interoperability issues, psychoanalytical/psychological issues, virtual and augmented realities, etc. My early work on the 'topology of intentionality' - structuring of psychoanalytical transformations within and without the symbolic. I'm thinking also psychoanalytical modeling in general. What does it mean to model the human? (What constitutes a model?) Avatars in Second Life, Poser: modeling paralleling the appearance of the human body. This might be considered formal mimicry. Take the formal mimicry down to its basic elements, remapped in Blender and/or other 3d programs: interrelationships of limbs. Empathetic identification with emotional 'states' indicated by limb arrangements. Return to the full body in Second Life: Mapping in which tensions reflect human behaviors/activities - sexual, angered, submissive, dominant, and so forth. The _surreal_ body - manipulations impossible in the real world. The interior of the avatar body: sheaves, intersections, hollows. What coheres externally falls apart to the point of transparency, disjunctions. (Imagine pulling a weight around in second life, lungs or heart or liver: how would that 'be'?) Think of the system/panoply of gestures in silent film: moving from gesture to gesture. So there are codes and narratives constructed from moments of codes. Issues of scripting: To what level of detail (differentiation, integra- tion) are behaviors applied? Double level of extrapolation: Poser or Second Life morphing - then the coding in relation to human morphing (morphology). In other words <pose1> - {X} - <pose2> where {X} is the potential set of generated 'betweens' in Poser or human behavior. In Poser jump-cuts are conceivable if details down to the level of the frame are perceptibly disparate (disconnected); in human behavior, jump-cuts are impossible. In human behavior, matter and time flow continuously; Reichenbach's gen- identity holds. Poser is cinematic, spatially analogic, temporally digital; human behavior is spatially and temporally analogic. Modeling and the 'uncanny' - modeling of human meat. (Disturbances of the field - Carolee Schneeman, Beuys, early Acconci, are relevant here, a minimum of props.) What are the empathetic forces at work across the real/ virtual boundary? What are the introjective/projective (i.e. jectivities) processes? Consider: humans are always already modeled in relation to each other; to themselves. Modeling is replete inscription; inscription implies codes and protocols. The condition is always one of culture; culture characterizes the organic (think of Heinz von Foerster on negation as fundamental to organic behavior). There are issues of self/other, body-skein, suturing, healing, etc. Human modeling, avatar-creation: 1. the body (space); 2. the body in time (behavior) - body as behavior-space. Behavioral coding: neural nets on one hand, bvh files and totalized body on the other: what are the code interstices/interfaces between them? Attach a neural net to a Poser body; import into Blender (element reduc- tion, mapping), import into Second Life (formal description of tension / relaxation in space-time). http://www.asondheim.org/beefsteakpolypore1.jpg http://www.asondheim.org/beefsteakpolypore2.jpg