Jon wrote: *From the other side come humans moving closer to the non-human or even simply a different human: plastic surgeries and botox'd lips, Thailand's cross-dressing prostitutes, internet catfishing, Victor-Victoria, "Boy's don't cry", butoh dance, (acting in general?).*
Don't forget the entire posthuman movement. davew On Thu, Jan 21, 2021, at 12:40 PM, jon zingale wrote: > From a naive glance, there appears a misleading duality, that of approaching > the valley from one side or the other. For instance, the use of puppets to > bring the non-human closer to the human: Jim Henson's work, the dancing > figures in Kimmel's piece, the neural net fake exemplified by "Nixon's moon > landing" > <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rkQn-43ixs&ab_channel=NowThisNews>, neural > net fever dreams of photorealistic models that never existed > <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36lE9tV9vm0&t=385s&ab_channel=TeroKarrasFI>, > or the now all-to-common place notion of an embedded avatar as in "Snow > Crash", "All Tomorrow's Parties", "The Matrix" ... > From the other side come humans moving closer to the non-human or even simply > a different human: plastic surgeries and botox'd lips, Thailand's > cross-dressing prostitutes, internet catfishing, Victor-Victoria, "Boy's > don't cry", butoh dance, (acting in general?). > What seems strange to me is that in any puppet-puppeteer case it is not > always clear that it is one bringing the other closer to the valley. It > doesn't even appear to be directly a function of *being human* as in the case > of this slime mould driven robot face > <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0i-Df4w4KY&ab_channel=NewScientist>. Here a > non-human puppeteers a non-human face, the combination of which drives an > observer toward the uncanny valley. > Other times, it isn't about misrepresentation but rather identity tracing or > a transformation of representation. There is the holding fixed of Dorothy as > she moves from black-and-white to Technicolor, the holding fixed of Mary > Poppins as she enters an animated-context, or the transformation of Milo to > "animated Milo" as he passes through the phantom tollbooth. > There are also those themes that appear in some religions and sci-fi where > humans themselves are vessels available to "ride" as puppets: Ghost in the > Shell, Altered Carbon, or in the case of loa. An interesting, though > tangential, case is that of stop motion animation. Here, it isn't really > puppetry nor strictly animation. Like the former, there is something of an > artifact in the world. Something that is there to be manipulated. Like the > latter, these manipulations are enacted by something outside of time, part of > a time outside of time, in-between the frames. > Perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of such a frontier isn't being able to > tell the difference between a fake or not, but not caring about the sources > of information. With deep fakes come a kind of modularity, one where *voice* > is treated like a backend to be swapped out. The *voice of Nixon* is lost > among many or any. > Here, China has already taken the plunge > <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iZuffHPDAw&ab_channel=NewChinaTV>. We can > all see that these news anchors are AI, and no one questions this fact. What > becomes questionable, or rather obscured, is whose perspective we are > presented with. But, this is already the case at once whenever scripted news > is decoupled from whatever it is to be journalism. Again, I cite the *Telecom > act* and the disappearance of the radio disc jockey. > Lastly, there is the cyborg revolution. I am thinking of Donna Haraway's > "Cyborg Manifesto" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cyborg_Manifesto>, or > every time I prepare a post by googling, looking through my books, or more > generally consulting my extended mind. > Sent from the Friam mailing list archive <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/> > at Nabble.com. > > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ >
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