The Final Fantasy XIII soundtrack has been on full blast and even Scrivener has been pleasantly surprised that I’ve turned up to work every day. The scramble for virtue as we start to keel over into the new [academic] year seems to be bearing fruit so far to the tune of clacking keys and the whoosh of sent drafts.
Sticky, lazy Light
I spend quite a bit of time reading and thinking about light, colour, maths and rendering engines. I don’t want to retread it too much here, because I’m told that that stuff isn’t as interesting as I think it is, but I was trying to pin down what exactly the qualities of a CGI image are that make it obvious as a rendering – how in your gut you know that it was made in a computer.
From what I have observed, IRL light isn’t particularly good at doing what it’s supposed to. It’s lazy and unpredictable. It’s no respecter of vectors and bounces so much as feeling of where it might go and what type of colours it might produce. Light seems to operate on reckons and hunches in unpredictable ways. It might infinitesimally alter the shade of the shadows at the joining of your wall and ceiling by taking some blue from the lampshade in the opposite corner. It might scatter into three precisely even gradients around a tabletop – just to describe what I can see from where I’m sat.
Light travels slowly on the Disc and is slightly heavy, with a tendency to pile up against high mountain ranges. Research wizards have speculated that there is another, much speedier type of light which allows the slower light to be seen, but since this moves too fast to see they have been unable to find a use for it.
Last Continent – Terry Pratchett
In rendering, especially these ones that are very much in the zeitgeist, the light is too scientific. It follows the rules: There’s a light source, surfaces bounce it to various intensities and directions and the scene is lit. It gives you a sense of the void outside the render. In the non-rendered world there are no voids, no light and not-light, everything is sort of sticky and light just… hangs around, taking up space. That’ll be the thing that lets you know if you’re in a simulation, if the light looks too energetic, like it’s doing well at it’s job.
Of course this could just be a matter of better computation. A lot of very realistic looking renders do a very good job of casting micro-interactions to the point where you would very much struggle without some forensics to tell it’s a render. They’ve put in hundreds of hours of intense computation and heavy maths to get light’s sheer ambivilenbce Just Right. It’s those edge cases that are more interesting.
Ambient Critique
This piece for AIGA begins to point at something that I find quite frustrating in academic design work; the downward spiral of calls for reflection and critique that seem to emerge from a field that is perpetually put on a crisis pedestal. The article argues, with a particular view to graphic design, that critique is everywhere since design is the materialisation of ideas and thus suffuses the whole of culture. We don’t need to look for critique or create new space but find better ways of capturing the abundance of criticism in the material world; on Reddit threads and bus-stop conversations. I like this idea of a sort of ambient critical space. That rather than seeking out critique or building elite forums to enact it you could just sort of absorb it from the information environment by osmosis. Or even seek it in other places. What if you uploaded your work to 4chan instead of Behance?
The article also rings parallels with the idea that there is no discipline of design; that it’s dissolved into everything else. Whatever you think of it, I’m very much into this idea, even if it’s just an Overton Window to move the conversation about definitions, disciplines and ‘reflection’ on or better relegate it to the trash pile of history. I’ve sat in too many hot, dark lecture theatres and watched super-smart people who can’t agree call for more critique and reflectivity as a way to mollify the audience and each other.
Cynically, it’s also a way of reinforcing power in the cabal gathered in the hot, sweaty, dark lecture theatre. I’ve been reading about how contested narratives in machine learning are sites of power, both ethnographically and sociologically. In these circumstances, arguments like ‘we don’t know enough’ or ‘what the other’s understand is wrong’ are ways of affirming privileged: ‘It is a strategy to exclude other voices in the discourse by stating that their claims are naive.‘
Recents
Bracket: Takes Action – the fourth instalment in the architecture-ish journal – includes a piece from me – Exit Spaces; From Koreshan Cults to Wireless Mesh Networks. The text explores Albert O. Hirschmann‘s four responses to change in an organisation or state through a contemporary technological lens. First of all there is ‘Exit’ – simply leaving the state you are unhappy with – then ‘Voice’ – protest – and then Loyalty; sticking with it. The piece examines extra-territorial or extra-state organisations through history, from American communes to the ambitions of Seasteading and finally the growth of mesh networks and distributed exit communities. I actually wrote the piece six years ago and it seems that the journal has had some problems which means it’s only just been published now. It’s available on Amazon and other, better book-sellers.
My website got featured in the Cargo Collective newsletter this week. Just a nice big screen-grab. I’m concerned this legitimises the hours I spent tweaking the CSS on it and that I might feel the need to comfortably retire into obsolescence as a relatively passable visual designer someday soon. That’d be nice. You might have noticed I’m still tweaking this blog. It’s getting closer to a place where I’m happy with it. Anyway, enough about me, what about the Internet?
Short Stuff
- If you and I speak about games then you know that I think Disco Elysium is the best game I played in the last decade. Here’s a super interesting in-depth video examining the design of their character progression system – the ‘thought cabinet.’ They were inspired by the design of digital shark-baiting arena Twitter dot com as a space that supports and encourages conflict (not in a good way) which is what the voices-in-your-head of Disco Elysium are all about.
- Tom Armitage sent me some stuff in response to my musing on game engines last week including this post of his about virtual cameras which was super interesting.
- This also reminded me of the hacking of cult demo P.T. where after much effort, it was discovered that the ghost is behind you all the time which makes the legendarily rare and terrifying demo more horrifying rather than less.
- I discovered that there’s an actual name for the almost universally-recognised call-and-response knock; shave and a haircut (two bits). There’s a name for everything these days.
- Someone made an HTML5 version of Winamp – Webamp. All that’s missing is a CRT monitor and a pink studded belt and I am fully ready to go on my self-cosplay from 2001.
- The bottom of this blog has an email subscription option and a couple of folks have put their email addresses in there. I haven’t used it yet but I might one day so you can put your email address in there too if you like.
That’s all, love you, speak to you next week.