un-tethered

New Book: EVOLUTION HAUTE COUTURE

From the website:
The National Center for Contemporary Arts (Kaliningrad Branch, Russia) presents Evolution Haute Couture: Art and Science in the Post-Biological Age, 1 Volume – Practice. The first volume of anthology is a printed catalogue with descriptions, technical info and photographs of art projects, as well as a unique collection of 45 documentary films on 2 DVD-ROMs about artworks recently created using the latest twenty-first century technologies: artificial life, robotics, bio and genetic engineering. The medium in these artworks is living or lifelike matter, and the properties of living organisms and technologically reproduced artefacts are combined to produce the method. The anthology gives a comprehensive overview of the current stage of contemporary techno-biological art. It provides a panorama of artistic strategies for granting and withdrawing the gift of authenticity. The analysis of these strategies opens up new possibilities for creative production and cultural commentary. The presentation of the project was held in the framework of the XXX Moscow International Film Festival, and art exhibitions in Kaliningrad, Moscow and Sankt-Petersburg, carried out on international contemporary art festivals and conferences in Berlin, Tomsk, Yekaterinburg and Petrozavodsk. In 2009 the Evolution Haute Couture project won the National Innovation Prize (Moscow, Russia), awarded annually for achievements in contemporary visual arts.

More info at: http://www.videodoc.ncca-kaliningrad.ru/eng/

Animation Practice

I spent a little time over the holiday brushing up on some animation techniques. Jason Ryan has a series great tutorial videos and an easy-to-use rigged robot character named Boris that goes along with the tutorials. My interest is not in the disney/warner bros. style exaggerated movement, but in the techniques themselves. Learning to identify and set poses (primary, secondary, break-down), gaining a better understanding of the graph editor, and learning to see movement (with the same acuity that I see form) are what I’m after. I’ll soon be using these techniques to animate a few characters for a project led by Tirtza Even. More about that later.

Fallen Revised

Exhibited first in 2006 with 5 sequences, Fallen is a looping 3d animation of a monstrous creature who falls, repeatedly, through empty space. Simulated dynamics and special effects are used to generate the characters behavior rather than keyframes. I’ve recently expanded the animation to 15 sequences and re-rendered it with a white background.

The reason or motivation for the character’s fall is unclear–was she pushed, did she slip or jump? As she falls, she collides with invisible obstacles that make her body slump, recoil, twist, and contort uncontrollably. She is helpless yet resilient; her fall pitiful but mesmerizing. As the sequences continue, it becomes apparent that although each fall is different, there is no change, nothing develops or suggests a narrative progression that might eventually  arrive at a culmination or conclusion. Fallen is not an event or circumstance but an endlessly variable condition.

Fallen_Suspension presents stills from the animations as a vertical line of small, contorted 3D figures.

Character Study: Developments

The form (morphology) of walker has changed slightly. He has longer, thinner legs, feet have been added, and the body/sphere is smaller.  The ground is pink checkers rather than green, and the parameters of the simulation itself have been altered. The most significant change is that gravity has been lowered by half. The new settings mean walker’s movements are more varied, and he gets up off the ground more often. Here’s an early run with the new settings.

In order to have both more control and more options for simulating expressive creature movements, I’ve been considering a couple of alternatives. One is a more sophisticated version of the Breve creature simulator developed by Lee Spector called SuperDuperWalker. The code includes a window of sliders for adjusting parameters, which is both convenient and helpful for tracking changes. Number of legs, segments, length, etc. can be adjusted as well as the rate and kinds of mutation.

At present, the stages of the process are:

1. design a character
2. design a base mesh (cubes, spheres, cylindars) version that can be duplicated in Breve
3. run the simulation using the basement
4. import simulation results (the position coordinates for each of the base mesh parts) back into Maya to animate the base mesh
5. rig the base mesh so that it drives the original design to animate it
6. texture, light, and animate the original design

With SuperDuperWalker, the process could change to:

1. run the Breve simulation
2. design a Maya base mesh to match the body form evolved by the simulator
3. derive a new character model that will fit the base mesh closely enough to be animated (this is the most significant part of the change–the character’s form is derived from evolved data rather than from my imagination)
4. rig the base mesh so that it drives the new character model and animates it
5. texture, light, and animate the new character model

Meeting with Stephen (code master) this week to set up importing the new walker settings into Maya and to see how much work would be involved in making the changes needed to get SuperDuperWalker data imported into Maya.

Character Study: Background

The program I’ve been using to evolve “Walker” animations is an open source evolutionary simulator called Breve. It was developed by Jon Klein and is based on evolved virtual creature studies done by Karl Simms. I don’t remember where I first ran across simulations of creatures “learning” to move, but I was immediately struck by the expressive quality of the generated motions.  Some examples:

The expressive potential of the simulations along with the conceptual potential of incorporating computationally devised solutions into my creative process was irresistible. So, for the past 18 months, with research support from the University of Michigan, I’ve been playing with the possibilities of evolved, simulated movement and trying to piece things together into a sustainable project. Below is a summary and a few videos that document what I’ve accomplished so far. More to come.

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Character Study: WalkerOne

Like the rabbit hole that Alice falls through into Wonderland, three dimensional computer simulators are a portal to virtual worlds where the parameters of physical reality can be mimicked and altered. As the first subject of inquiry in a series of character movement studies, WalkerOne was placed in such an environment and challenged to scramble as far from its starting point as possible in twenty seconds (see video #1). Another fourteen members of WalkerOne’s generation also endeavored to roll, twitch, twist, flop, and lunge as far and as quickly as they could with their given physical capacities. The two who were most successful were selected to be moved ahead to the next generation—along with thirteen new walkers whose capabilities were assigned by random mutation of the previous generation’s traits. The cycle was repeated thousands of times.

For the purposes of Character Study, where each creature ends up and which one goes the farthest is of little significance; what matters is how they get there. Rather than computationally employing the principles of evolutionary biology to optimize efficiency, Character Study animates digital creatures in simulated environments to procure sequences of serendipitously poignant and expressive body movements. From this construct, which is both scientific experiment and improvisational comedy, emerge bodies and behaviors that are odd and unreal, but also alluringly familiar and right. The simulations are metaphorical trial runs that test ways of being in a difficult and indifferent world; vignettes of individual potential contending with corporeal realities and opportunities for adaptation. In other words, typical stories of daily life within a body.

Character Study: WalkerOne (simulation), video of 3D simulation, 2009. The first movie below documents the beginning of WalkerOne’s evolution. The view is looking into the simulator as the camera follows the creature’s movement. Each time a new creature appears at “Start,” a new “Driver” (set of physical capabilities) is initiating its test run. This cycle is repeated thousands of times.

Character Study: WalkerOne (level), video of 3D animation, 2009. In the simulator, the position and orientation of WalkerOne’s joints are recorded at precise intervals and exported to a 3D modeling and animation program. After review, sections of the recorded movements are selected and applied to a more refined model of WalkerOne’s morphology to animate its movement. Surface textures are assigned to the model to further develop its’ character and finally it is rendered as a looping animation. The point of view in WalkerOne (level) is near the ground at nearly the same level as the creature.

Character Study: WalkerOne (down), video of 3D animation, 2009. The third video is a slightly longer animation and puts the viewer in a position of looking down from above the creature. All background information is removed and the video is prepared so that what appears white on a computer screen (as it is here) is transparent when projected making WalkerOne appear to be walking directly on the projection surface (floor or ground).

“…disorientation begets creative thinking.”

In an article titled “How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect,” the New York Times describes studies indicating that anomalous experiences–encounters with things that don’t make sense–invigorate our brain’s drive to find meaning, which it does by seeking patterns. It seems maintaining coherence is such a strong imperative for us that our drive and ability to do so increases when we encounter its absence. Students who read a nonsensical story were later more able to find and remember patterns of letters than were a second group who read a perfectly understandable story. So far, though, the impact is only relevant to implicit learning, when we learn without being aware of it, rather than explicit learning, when we intentionally set out to learn something.

Another potentially related phenomenon that I notice occurs whenever I show students images of exquisite corpses or when they participate in making them is the sense of pleasure involved. These odd, sometimes unsettling images of disparate parts attached together consistently elicit a smile, sometimes outright laughter. Is it nervous laughter, a defense to reassure ourselves the lack-of-coherence is not a threat, or is some aspect of it enjoyable?

The article concludes: “the new research supports what many experimental artists, habitual travelers and other novel seekers have always insisted: at least some of the time, disorientation begets creative thinking.”

This is reassuring given that my own creative process is primarily one of configuring meaning out of disparate parts.

new book On Monsters

Peter Olson at the NIU Art Museum called my attention to a new book, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of our Worst Fears, which will be released in a few weeks. From the jacket cover:

Monsters. Real or imagined, literal or metaphorical, they have exerted a dread fascination on the human mind for many centuries. They attract and repel us, intrigue and terrify us, and in the process reveal something deeply important about the darker recesses of our collective psyche.
Stephen Asma’s On Monsters is a wide-ranging cultural and conceptual history of monsters–how they have evolved over time, what functions they have served for us, and what shapes they are likely to take in the future. Asma begins with a letter from Alexander the Great in 326 B.C. detailing an encounter in India with an “enormous beast–larger than an elephantthree ominous horns on its forehead.” From there the monsters come fast and furious–Behemoth and Leviathan, Gog and Magog, the leopard-bear-lion beast of Revelation, Satan and his demons, Grendel and Frankenstein, circus freaks and headless children, right up to the serial killers and terrorists of today and the post-human cyborgs of tomorrow. Monsters embody our deepest anxieties and vulnerabilities, Asma argues, but they also symbolize the mysterious and incoherent territory just beyond the safe enclosures of rational thought. Exploring philosophical treatises, theological tracts, newspapers, pamphlets, films, scientific notebooks, and novels, Asma unpacks traditional monster stories for the clues they offer about the inner logic of an era’s fears and fascinations. In doing so, he illuminates the many ways monsters have become repositories for those human qualities that must be repudiated, externalized, and defeated.
Asma suggests that how we handle monsters reflects how we handle uncertainty, ambiguity, insecurity. And in a world that is daily becoming less secure and more ambiguous, he shows how we might learn to better live with monsters–and thereby avoid becoming one.

Looking forward to it!