The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

Bvh file behavior collision traced in 'mid-air'


It's four ai/em in the morning, past the dark night of the soul; I am
ashamed to read fiction, there's so little time left; my neck is in pain,
my shoulders, those regions beneath the upper jaw, my left leg and foot as
usual. The greater the dusk, the greater the rush of voices and ignorance
on my part, not theirs. I work on useless problems - Second Life instead
of the First for example, or this artificial physics instead of the real,
concrete world we've been thrown into, our first lack of choice as death
of course is our last.

In this Second Life I can at least comprehend since I'm a surgeon here. In
all this world the cut's the thing, dreams following suit. So I thought
myself a myth, that of colliding behaviors, Julu for example doing neither
one thing nor another, but then it seemed... it seemed as if it was just
that, another myth. So I put it to the test and within Second Life, as
within the First, of which the Second is but a part or excuse or poor
actor - within Second Life, as I was saying, a double bind produces - not
the tension of stasis or sudden and catastrophic collapse to one or
another mode of behaving, being, because in Second Life, _behaving is
being_ - but a confusion of behaviors, an army of nodes gone amuck, deep
distortion of figuration here as nothing is figured out. A fugue state's
inverted, the body twists and turns - neither organized nor disorganized,
neither one nor the other, that is to say perhaps the Sheffer stroke -
Neither A nor B - and that is to say the appearance of the dual - both A
and B, and yes, the order's non-symmetrical as (A)(B) does not equal (B)
(A). Isn't this some sort of breakdown, one without the other, not the
Sheffer, as fossils, remnants, are manifest, and then perhaps the dual?
This is a mess, it's the mess at work, since Sheffer and dual break down
here - what emerges isn't synergetic either - just something untoward,
unpredictable, bordering, but not quite, on the chaotic. What does this
mean except that if extrapolated to the real we'd have the same type of
complexity suddenly appearing as in Wolfram's automata - that might be a
bit close to the real then, the Second melding into the First, as the
Second, noted above, is already within the First, if not the First
enveloping the Second. It's confusing, deeply so, inherently so, and the
evidence is clear in the images below, the clarity of A, the roughness of
B perhaps and the contamination of each by the other, the irruption of
confusion in the trails left behind.

I can't think clearly beyond this, only to note that the ability to think
itself will draw to a close, that soon there will be a dawn and I will be
blind and thoughtless, and that will be the end of it, confusion as well,
and I will not be present for that end or the pretense of purity which
might, for some, follow it, follow suit.

A 'smoothed' hand-created bvh file (produced in Poser) is traced:

http://www.alansondheim.org/smooth1.jpg
  - a smooth hand-manipulated bvh file and its trace

http://www.alansondheim.org/smooth2.jpg
  - second trace from the same bvh file

A 'rough' altered motion-capture file (produced at the Virtual
Environments Laboratory, West Virginia University) is traced:

http://www.alansondheim.org/rough.jpg
  - a rough mocap-generated bvh file and its trace

The following two traces constitute starting with the rough bvh file
and starting the smooth file without stopping the rough. The result is
'perturbed' trace which is smooth with occasional irruptions:

http://www.alansondheim.org/smoothrough1.jpg
  - the smooth file activated after the rough file - first trace

http://www.alansondheim.org/smoothrough2.jpg
  - the smooth file activated after the rough file - second trace

landscape

http://www.alansondheim.org/smock.jpg

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2008 21:13:02 -0400
From: moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG
To: PORTSIDE@LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG
Subject: Castro: Gustav hit Cuba like nuclear bomb

Castro says Gustav hit Cuba like nuclear bomb

Reuters - September 3, 2008

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSB32165520080903

HAVANA (Reuters) - Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro
said on Wednesday that Hurricane Gustav hit Cuba like a
nuclear bomb and left authorities struggling to feed
people on the hard-hit Isle of Youth.

In a column on the Internet, he said Gustav, which
slammed into western Cuba with winds of 150 mile per
hour (240 kilometers per hour) on Saturday, had damaged
or destroyed 100,000 houses and dealt a blow to
agriculture.

He said television shots from the Isle of Youth, which
is 40 miles off Cuba's southwestern coast "reminded me
of the desolation I saw when I visited Hiroshima,"
referring to the Japanese city destroyed by a U.S.
nuclear bomb in 1945 at the end of World War Two.

"Now the battle is to feed the hurricane victims,"
Castro wrote, saying that only two of 16 bakeries on
the island were functioning.

The ailing 82-year-old, who has become a prolific
column writer since giving up power to brother Raul
Castro following undisclosed surgery two years ago,
printed a letter from a friend from the Isle of Youth
who said authorities estimated that 20,000 of the
25,000 houses on the island had been damaged.

On Tuesday, state-run news agency AIN said in a story
quoting Cuba Vice President Carlos Lage that more than
90,000 homes had been damaged or destroyed in the
mainland province of Pinar del Rio, which Gustav struck
after raking over the Isle of Youth.

Pinar del Rio has about 750,000 residents and the Isle
of Youth about 86,000.

No deaths from the storm have been reported.

Castro warned that recovering from Gustav would require
sacrifice on the part of Cubans and that the cost would
be high.

"A hundred million dollars means only nine dollars per
resident, and we need much more. We need 30 times, 40
times that number only to cover our most elemental
necessities," he said.

"Such effort must come from the work of the people.
Nobody can do it for us."

Russia, which has been renewing ties with Cuba, its
former Cold War ally, said it would send four planes
loads of food and other items to the island starting on
Wednesday, according to Russian news reports.

After crossing Cuba, Gustav moved into the Gulf of
Mexico where its winds weakened to 110 mph (177 kph)
and struck the central Louisiana coast on Monday.

(Reporting by Jeff Franks; Editing by Philip Barbara)

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Screen / Text


Testing the waters - images from screen-tests, from distance/resolution
tests, from Julu Twine's distance powers.

Speeds and textures changed, lateral movement increased or decreased,
objects motivated, nothing scaled back.

There's a strange beauty to these, film stills gone amuck.

"If you look at one picture in the next ten years, make sure it's one of
these!" - Leslie Thornton

http://www.alansondheim.org/ screentest jpgs 1-14 , beauty these!

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Odyssey/48/12/22 (Second Life site)