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