RECEIVED FROM JOE MCKAY
Unretouched photo of Joe McKay.
Recent spam that horrified Joe McKay.
A nice combo GIF that Joe McKay found and thought I'd like.
Joe McKay's picture review of "Wall•e" the new Pixar movie with a pseudo-enviromental message.
A nice picture that Joe McKay clipped from a contest site and liked very much himself.
An image that Joe McKay received and wants deconstructed by feminists [It looks fine to me, Joe.]
A photo by Andrew Wright that Joe McKay animated with a kitteh & bloodeh hand.
man, there's something disturbing seeing those all together.
About a week ago we took a break from the woods and went to town to see Wall-E. It was great! If you're gonna do 21st century gender stereotypes, you might as well make the girl robot into a pretty white egg with a big gun and a itchy trigger finger.
Yeah, it was okay. I love the "Macintosh will save humanity and the world" angle. Do you think Eve's battery cannot be replaced like the iphone? The self-referential drops combined with the ensuing hypocrisy made the movie for me. The affable humans were great. I love the idea that if given all the toys we want that's what we turn into. And the way they drew the humans skirted the uncanny valley in a pretty clever way.
I'm still pretty proud of my iphone refection photoshop job. I should do an instructable.
nice. I figured you found that image somewhere. I looked up uncanny valley. What a great term!
i was talking to richard about how speed racer, while a fairly medicore film, was one of the few films to posit a soultion to the uncanny valley (ie make everything look as plastic as humanly possible, to embrace artifice), and how it looked different then anything i had seen in the cinema. the pixar teams soultion, namely to work as hard on versmillitude, is bound to failure, i think, but occasionally there are moments of sublimity that convince me otherwise (ie the grass in finding nemo, the tunnels in ratatouielle, the long ballet in space here)
R.M. was blithering to me about that conversation that you had with him, Anthony, but as usual I wasn't listening to him. (Though his reportage of a conversation between the two of you has the effect of me thinking I see you more often than I actually do) The upshot was that I couldn't remember the term "uncanny valley", yet here we have joester with all his fancy-pants degrees and knowledge of the secret URL for web 2.0, and so naturally he'd know about it too.
Just saying.
If you have humans who are nearer to robots (say, a disaffected check-out clerk in a supermarket), does that narrow the valley?
My pants are, if anything, fancy - it's true. Sally, that chart is 100% my favorite chart anywhere. I love the dip with zombie right at the bottom.
M.Jean, that's certainly a question that comes up in robotics and AI conversations. There's a big difference between a robot (all machine) and a cyborg (machine - human combo). Can we add enough technology to humans that they actually slip back in to the uncanny valley? The thing is the valley is all about perception and what we're comfortable with. The Coclear Implant, even a few years ago was incredibly controversial - now it's becoming much more accepted. Glasses (if you remember your "The Name of the Rose") suffered the same problem. The BORG and Data were the ultimate TV portraits of robot meeting cyborg.
speaking of Pinocchio, Klucas2.0 sent me this awesome link to a project she saw at Bard college. Featuring, I'm told, a Torontonian artist.
http://davidhorvitz.com/pinocchio/
He lives in the Canadian part of Brooklyn.
(or maybe he was born here) I love his stuff, just can't remember where it was featured recently. Maybe VVORK.
anthony,
There have been some other valley bridging attempts recently. Sin City springs to ming and the awesome 3D Beowulf. Both are starting with actors and working their way back so the lipsync is better. I still found Beowulf didn't get across the valley for me, but I know others didn't mind as much. The best uncanny valley movie ever is Polar Express - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlAr30I9yrM&feature=related
followed closely by the under appreciated Final Fantasy movie. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnE64DbnUzY
I mentioned the Valley on my blog but only in passing and it's been a few years.
I like the quotes from the roboticists who say "it's only a hypothesis and a damned bad one."
Lukas Geronimas and David Horvitz are the artists. I should not speak to the Canadianness of either as this all comes second hand. At least I have the names right now.
I googled him, he describes himself as being from Swansea instead of Toronto. (been part of Toronto since 1967)
I still claim to be from Saskatchewan. We both have our excellent reasons.
for even more uncanny valleyness check out a recent post at my other favorite blog. Uncanny Valley shoulda been the name of a ride at Disney World.
http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2008/07/the-rock-afire.html#more
Great link, mnobody! That Rockafire movie looks damn good. And now I know the name of the guy who invented whac-a-mole. Speaking of animatronics, I was just reading about my uncanny doppleganger, Laughing Sal, in David J. Skal's Screams of Reason. Skal says she was "...fat and crazy on the inflated promises of modernism, a coarsened counterpart to the female robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, pumped up to Hindenburg proportions. ... 'Ho-ho-ho,' she seemed to say, 'come see what the modern world has to offer you! Come in, and get it out of your system! There's nothing inside me — ho-ho-ho — and there's nothing inside you. We're all just clockworks and cams! And since there's nothing you can do about it, you might as well laugh!'"
Skal is talking about the Sal on the left, which was outside the Suprise House at Euclid Beach Park in Ohio. The one I saw, on the right, was at the San Francisco Penny Arcade.
some notes:
1) polar express is the example i keep using, because it is so fucking freaky. it is the purest example of Das Unheimliche in recent memory.
2) i have yet to see final fantasy.
3) the problem with beauwolf, is that it attempts to be "real", and because we have such an idea of what is real, it falls into the gap.
4) i wonder, where people like amanda lepore fit in?
5) uncanny valley really does seem to be more of a humanist/lit theory application, and there has been some controversy about it's use--i dont know how good the science is, but it feels right, and it is useful in a world that is in the middle of figuring out where humanity is.
6) there is a really tight, quick read called The Turk, about the first automan, which i would recommend as ian intro to the early bit about these things.
For me, the Uncanny Valley is useful because a) it puts a term to something we've all noticed, and b) it sounds awesome. I too am unsure about how helpful it really is in a scientific context. How would you test it?
In retrospect, liked Beauwolf - I thought it was using the uncanny valley as currency. While other games and movies fight it, Beauwolf indulges in it. Think it's creepy? perfect, we have you right where we want you! I never felt that the movie was trying to present us with reality. That and I'm a sucker for 3D jokes about spears poking at genitals.
anthony - you got a link to The Turk text? I've know the example but not the story.
Sally - that's an awesome description of Laughing Sally ever. The whole place is like that, but Sally really sets the stage. Why isn't there a penny arcade museum in every town?
ARRRG! typos never reveal themselves until the always tempting post button has been well and firmly pressed.
joe: here is an amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/Turk-Famous-Eighteenth-Century-Chess-Playing-Machine/dp/0802713912
i think i would have bought your arguements, if it wasn;t for angelina jolies pr oemenice, but she unsettles most movies...(like when she played marriane pear, part of me thought, wow this is good performance and part of me couldnt get over the jolieness of it all)
As I recall the Turk was mentioned in Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine. Or something Turk-like.
I loved that the hype was you got to see her naked. Computer generated ... but naked!
update from Joester on Laughing Sal...
sorry, had to be done.
That's okay, puts me in good company.
I have a feeling the academic $99.00 price tag has never been paid.
Maybe film school. Gap-Toothed Women is a pretty good documentary.
Ahhhhhhh! It's the Uncanny Sally!
Sally of the Dolls
Night of the living Sally.
It is funny that they include zombies on that graph above. Don't they belong on a different axis, the dead-undead-alive continuum, vs. the mechanical-cyborg-organic continuum?
I wouldn't be able to understand that without its own chart.
You gotta keep in mind that the chart was made in the late 70's or something. So creepy near dead robots were not as common as they are now. I wonder where HAL is on the Uncanny valley?
We were watching Delovely last night, and noticed an Uncanny Valley effect when all the actors got makeup to make them look like old people at the end of the movie.
|
Unretouched photo of Joe McKay.
Recent spam that horrified Joe McKay.
A nice combo GIF that Joe McKay found and thought I'd like.
Joe McKay's picture review of "Wall•e" the new Pixar movie with a pseudo-enviromental message.
A nice picture that Joe McKay clipped from a contest site and liked very much himself.
An image that Joe McKay received and wants deconstructed by feminists [It looks fine to me, Joe.]
A photo by Andrew Wright that Joe McKay animated with a kitteh & bloodeh hand.
- L.M. 7-31-2008 2:51 am
man, there's something disturbing seeing those all together.
- joester (guest) 7-31-2008 10:08 am
About a week ago we took a break from the woods and went to town to see Wall-E. It was great! If you're gonna do 21st century gender stereotypes, you might as well make the girl robot into a pretty white egg with a big gun and a itchy trigger finger.
- sally mckay 7-31-2008 4:55 pm
Yeah, it was okay. I love the "Macintosh will save humanity and the world" angle. Do you think Eve's battery cannot be replaced like the iphone? The self-referential drops combined with the ensuing hypocrisy made the movie for me. The affable humans were great. I love the idea that if given all the toys we want that's what we turn into. And the way they drew the humans skirted the uncanny valley in a pretty clever way.
- joester (guest) 7-31-2008 8:30 pm
I'm still pretty proud of my iphone refection photoshop job. I should do an instructable.
- joester (guest) 7-31-2008 8:34 pm
nice. I figured you found that image somewhere. I looked up uncanny valley. What a great term!
- sally mckay 7-31-2008 8:59 pm
i was talking to richard about how speed racer, while a fairly medicore film, was one of the few films to posit a soultion to the uncanny valley (ie make everything look as plastic as humanly possible, to embrace artifice), and how it looked different then anything i had seen in the cinema. the pixar teams soultion, namely to work as hard on versmillitude, is bound to failure, i think, but occasionally there are moments of sublimity that convince me otherwise (ie the grass in finding nemo, the tunnels in ratatouielle, the long ballet in space here)
- anthony (guest) 7-31-2008 9:06 pm
R.M. was blithering to me about that conversation that you had with him, Anthony, but as usual I wasn't listening to him. (Though his reportage of a conversation between the two of you has the effect of me thinking I see you more often than I actually do) The upshot was that I couldn't remember the term "uncanny valley", yet here we have joester with all his fancy-pants degrees and knowledge of the secret URL for web 2.0, and so naturally he'd know about it too.
Just saying.
- L.M. 7-31-2008 9:29 pm
If you have humans who are nearer to robots (say, a disaffected check-out clerk in a supermarket), does that narrow the valley?
- M.Jean 7-31-2008 9:54 pm
My pants are, if anything, fancy - it's true. Sally, that chart is 100% my favorite chart anywhere. I love the dip with zombie right at the bottom.
M.Jean, that's certainly a question that comes up in robotics and AI conversations. There's a big difference between a robot (all machine) and a cyborg (machine - human combo). Can we add enough technology to humans that they actually slip back in to the uncanny valley? The thing is the valley is all about perception and what we're comfortable with. The Coclear Implant, even a few years ago was incredibly controversial - now it's becoming much more accepted. Glasses (if you remember your "The Name of the Rose") suffered the same problem. The BORG and Data were the ultimate TV portraits of robot meeting cyborg.
- joester (guest) 7-31-2008 11:21 pm
speaking of Pinocchio, Klucas2.0 sent me this awesome link to a project she saw at Bard college. Featuring, I'm told, a Torontonian artist.
http://davidhorvitz.com/pinocchio/
- joester (guest) 7-31-2008 11:26 pm
He lives in the Canadian part of Brooklyn.
(or maybe he was born here) I love his stuff, just can't remember where it was featured recently. Maybe VVORK.
- L.M. 7-31-2008 11:36 pm
anthony,
There have been some other valley bridging attempts recently. Sin City springs to ming and the awesome 3D Beowulf. Both are starting with actors and working their way back so the lipsync is better. I still found Beowulf didn't get across the valley for me, but I know others didn't mind as much. The best uncanny valley movie ever is Polar Express - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlAr30I9yrM&feature=related followed closely by the under appreciated Final Fantasy movie. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnE64DbnUzY
- joester (guest) 7-31-2008 11:39 pm
I mentioned the Valley on my blog but only in passing and it's been a few years.
I like the quotes from the roboticists who say "it's only a hypothesis and a damned bad one."
- tom moody 7-31-2008 11:44 pm
Lukas Geronimas and David Horvitz are the artists. I should not speak to the Canadianness of either as this all comes second hand. At least I have the names right now.
- joester (guest) 7-31-2008 11:50 pm
I googled him, he describes himself as being from Swansea instead of Toronto. (been part of Toronto since 1967)
I still claim to be from Saskatchewan. We both have our excellent reasons.
- L.M. 8-01-2008 1:42 am
for even more uncanny valleyness check out a recent post at my other favorite blog. Uncanny Valley shoulda been the name of a ride at Disney World.
http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2008/07/the-rock-afire.html#more
- mnobody (guest) 8-01-2008 2:04 am
Great link, mnobody! That Rockafire movie looks damn good. And now I know the name of the guy who invented whac-a-mole. Speaking of animatronics, I was just reading about my uncanny doppleganger, Laughing Sal, in David J. Skal's Screams of Reason. Skal says she was "...fat and crazy on the inflated promises of modernism, a coarsened counterpart to the female robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, pumped up to Hindenburg proportions. ... 'Ho-ho-ho,' she seemed to say, 'come see what the modern world has to offer you! Come in, and get it out of your system! There's nothing inside me — ho-ho-ho — and there's nothing inside you. We're all just clockworks and cams! And since there's nothing you can do about it, you might as well laugh!'"
- sally mckay 8-01-2008 3:13 am
some notes:
1) polar express is the example i keep using, because it is so fucking freaky. it is the purest example of Das Unheimliche in recent memory.
2) i have yet to see final fantasy.
3) the problem with beauwolf, is that it attempts to be "real", and because we have such an idea of what is real, it falls into the gap.
4) i wonder, where people like amanda lepore fit in?
5) uncanny valley really does seem to be more of a humanist/lit theory application, and there has been some controversy about it's use--i dont know how good the science is, but it feels right, and it is useful in a world that is in the middle of figuring out where humanity is.
6) there is a really tight, quick read called The Turk, about the first automan, which i would recommend as ian intro to the early bit about these things.
- anthony (guest) 8-01-2008 5:44 am
For me, the Uncanny Valley is useful because a) it puts a term to something we've all noticed, and b) it sounds awesome. I too am unsure about how helpful it really is in a scientific context. How would you test it?
In retrospect, liked Beauwolf - I thought it was using the uncanny valley as currency. While other games and movies fight it, Beauwolf indulges in it. Think it's creepy? perfect, we have you right where we want you! I never felt that the movie was trying to present us with reality. That and I'm a sucker for 3D jokes about spears poking at genitals.
anthony - you got a link to The Turk text? I've know the example but not the story.
Sally - that's an awesome description of Laughing Sally ever. The whole place is like that, but Sally really sets the stage. Why isn't there a penny arcade museum in every town?
- joester (guest) 8-01-2008 6:53 am
ARRRG! typos never reveal themselves until the always tempting post button has been well and firmly pressed.
- joester (guest) 8-01-2008 7:00 am
joe: here is an amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/Turk-Famous-Eighteenth-Century-Chess-Playing-Machine/dp/0802713912
i think i would have bought your arguements, if it wasn;t for angelina jolies pr oemenice, but she unsettles most movies...(like when she played marriane pear, part of me thought, wow this is good performance and part of me couldnt get over the jolieness of it all)
- anthony (guest) 8-01-2008 8:35 am
As I recall the Turk was mentioned in Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine. Or something Turk-like.
- tom moody 8-01-2008 1:42 pm
I loved that the hype was you got to see her naked. Computer generated ... but naked!
- joester (guest) 8-01-2008 6:26 pm
update from Joester on Laughing Sal...
- sally mckay 8-01-2008 6:36 pm
sorry, had to be done.
- joester (guest) 8-01-2008 9:16 pm
That's okay, puts me in good company.
- sally mckay 8-01-2008 10:23 pm
I have a feeling the academic $99.00 price tag has never been paid.
- josester (guest) 8-01-2008 10:27 pm
Maybe film school. Gap-Toothed Women is a pretty good documentary.
- sally mckay 8-01-2008 11:57 pm
Ahhhhhhh! It's the Uncanny Sally!
- mnobody (guest) 8-02-2008 5:22 pm
Sally of the Dolls
- sally mckay 8-02-2008 5:41 pm
Night of the living Sally.
- joester (guest) 8-02-2008 6:59 pm
It is funny that they include zombies on that graph above. Don't they belong on a different axis, the dead-undead-alive continuum, vs. the mechanical-cyborg-organic continuum?
- sally mckay 8-02-2008 7:15 pm
I wouldn't be able to understand that without its own chart.
- L.M. 8-02-2008 7:38 pm
You gotta keep in mind that the chart was made in the late 70's or something. So creepy near dead robots were not as common as they are now. I wonder where HAL is on the Uncanny valley?
- joester (guest) 8-03-2008 7:45 am
We were watching Delovely last night, and noticed an Uncanny Valley effect when all the actors got makeup to make them look like old people at the end of the movie.
- sally mckay 8-03-2008 3:43 pm