[FRIAM] exploiting the uncanny valley...

[Prof David West]

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. 

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