BOX034: The Gruelling Work of Convincing Mediocrity

24.03.2124.03.21

DS032: I made a procedural Mars surface shader based last week so this was mostly about using that along with some more rigid body learning for the balloons. Also. Sound!

What even is real?

I’m still trying to work out what realism is and I’m only half joking when I say that I would write a book about realism investigating and examining the different situated interpretations of it. It’s just that I really hate writing. Generally, we could say that realism is often conflated with idealism and/or fantasy in the development of virtual worlds. For instance, Ted Kim has described the emphasis put into young, white skin in the research and development of ‘realistic’ skin rendering which indicates the bias that realism is to be found in the characteristics of one particular race and age group. The social idealism of young, white skin constructed through conventional readings of ‘beauty’ and reinforced through cosmetics and Hollywood is used to construct ‘realistic’ new worlds that reflect our misguided ideals as realistic.

However, I’m coming to think that realism is not just about comparing IRL to its simulation; comparing observed physical reality to its digital representation but about expectation and coherency. For instance, blockbuster video games unarguably have an inflated and unrealistic sense of ‘reality’ – everything is overblown and exaggerated with impossible physics and scale but the good ones have a realism that is coherent to their own worlds even if this is not realistic. Witcher 3 – empirically one of the best games of all time – displays realism that is internally coherent and draws you in but is certainly not realistic in its fantasy setting. I was rewatching the Harry Potter franchise over the last week or two with Mrs Revell and what broke the believability for me wasn’t the magic and fantasy but the lack of coherency in character behaviour such as when characters discuss key plot points within obvious earshot of each other (a recurring plot development technique in the first few films). It feels staged and incoherent with the urgency and secrecy that we’re told these plot points should be handled with.

When developing a virtual world, whether a fantasy setting or a convincing future vision, developers have to make a choice about expediency versus believability. The perception and common understanding is that more realism means more computing power. This can be got around using trickery and shortcuts or by making design choices about where detail can be sacrificed for expediency or detail is required and expediency must be sacrificed. Duplicate assets, distance fog, level of detail loading and popping textures are all indicators of these choices.

Of course not all virtual worlds strive for realism anyway. In fact, the real potential for computer graphics doesn’t lie in attempting to faithfully recreate reality but in seeing beyond it and showing new things. Years ago, I wrote a broad attempt to classify the aesthetic qualities of future visions based on their relationship to ‘realism’: Un-rendering which attempts to reveal the technical and political workings of realism, Low-rendering which intentionally uses cartoonish, reduced and low-poly imagery to encourage viewer engagement and hyper-rendering which attempt to ‘make the invisible visible’ to use the much-vaunted trope. These categories all skirt or subvert realism to engage audiences in critical thinking but it’s wholly incomplete as a typology and it feels like an aesthetic continuum that is always developing and mutating.

All of this was troubled when I was reminded of these curious renders by a Blender Artists poster, ‘Blitter’, which have been sat at the back of my head the last few months, occasionally re-emerging on the various boards and Subreddits I haunt. Blitter just wants to create ‘believable, realistic render of normal, mundane environments, poses, etc.’ which is something rarely seen in the painterly, hyper-real images that get the most attention and remarkable in its mundanity.

Blitter’s drive for ‘mundane environments and poses’ is reminiscent of Nick Foster’s evergreen rules for the Future Mundane. Foster suggests that there’s a relationship to be had between the idea and the audience enabled by normal, mundane, even boring settings and stories. He says that because our everyday experience of the material world is mundane, speculation should reflect this instead of the hysterical hyper-reality of mainstream product demonstrations. Importantly, Foster also highlights how our experience of the every day is flawed – things are broken and buggy and never work like they’re supposed to. Blitter has taken a similar tack, as opposed to the overwhelming but internally coherent realism of enormous, well-framed explosions, magic and lens flares, they are attempting the trickier task of grounding realism in technical flaws.

In the future, things will fail, but for the vast majority of the world this failure won’t be ‘the rocket is gonna crash into the planet,’ but ‘I can’t get the audio to work on Skype.’ The future will include taxes, illness, weather, transport delays and allergies. Things will break, things will fail to perform as promised, things will need fixing. Rendering the future as a partly broken space gives an audience something to hold onto, something relatable.
Nick Foster – The Future Mundane – 2013

Also, unlike Foster’s work on mundanity with Near Future Laboratory which is insightful, funny and seemingly always ahead of its time, the mundane realism of Blitter’s work is unnerving and spooky. The nameless character they have created falls deep inside the Uncanny Valley, creating feelings of familiar discomfort and unease, part of this is the lack of context or reading protocols – who is she? How are we supposed to read her? CGI characters like Lil Miquela jump over these issues by being contextualised in the larger-than-life performance of Instagram Influencer-dom. That is to say, I think Lil Miquela, despite being an uncanny technically realistic human is contextualised in a world of brands, product placement and idealistic lifestyles that we are tacitly aware is constructed and fake anyway and so the imposition of a CGI person, though remarkable in its own way, isn’t as unnerving since we can neatly compartmentalise her.

Blitter’s CGI character on the other hand, though also technically masterful is too eerily familiar and real. There are, of course, clues like the neatness of the hair and lack of distortion on reflective surfaces but I don’t think I’d spot it if I didn’t already know it was a render. We have all taken photos like these – bad lighting, out of focus, glaring flash, poor composition. You know, MySpace. However, in rendering, the technical construction of a CG image normally gives the creator god-like control over these factors. The composition, lighting, colour and focus can be finely controlled in a way that physical reality doesn’t even allow and so usually when constructing an image, artists (including myself) strive to perfect the inherited understanding of what is ‘good’ photographic construction: Three point light set ups, colour correction, pulled focus and rule of thirds certainly proliferate my sketches. To return to Kim’s point about skin we reflect the socially constructed ideal image as real; aspiring for an ideal as a mark of realism, as if the ideal is real.

The software are usually built with these templates of good practice in mind as well – the presets in the software are designed to make the conventionally well-composed and lit image much easier to achieve and consequently automate significant parts of it like glare, motion blur and blurring. To make his images, Blitter would have had to go some way and do a good amount of work to bypass the tendencies of Blender to automate ‘good images.’

It’s a shame that Blitter has not done a deeper documentation of the process as I think it would have revealed a lot about the software to know how they would have had to unpick it to achieve ‘bad’ images. It’s worth reading the threads on some of their posts though. The respondents tread around the aesthetic choices of the image in a really interesting way, highlighting the usual problems that plague renders in the jump to realism: Everything is a perfect right angle, textures repeat, film grain in the wrong places etc. I’m going to have to write this all up into a paper at some point aren’t I?

It’s also interesting to think about where a mundane computer graphics would fit in Warburton’s Uncanny Valley typology. Warburton considers the overblown, hyper-realism of mainstream cinema and the subcultures pushing the feasible limits of simulation and rendering to reveal the workings of software or play to deeper human desires – such as all those ‘satisfying’ simulations and animations but doesn’t make space for fakery and deception: The gruelling work of convincing mediocrity. Perhaps we need a broader typology.

Short Stuff

Nope

Ok that’s it. Struggled to get my brain to do words good today to write this. Feels like a real effort so I’m cutting it short and moving on. Love you deeply, speak soon.

BOX033: The Sailing Ship Effect

17.03.21

DS031: I wanted to experiment with rigid body physics which is another thing I haven’t spent enough time with. Unfortunately Eevee still can’t handle volumetrics without a lot of workarounds so it was back to Cycles and the expensive render times on this one.

At least it’s light when I wake up now. I miss the dark though; the quiet solitude of those first few hours, when it felt like everything else was very far away. My neighbour wakes up at 9 every day and opens their curtains and now it feels like they’re oversleeping since it’s been light for a few hours already.

I’ve edited down and put my tags back over there ←. Hopefully this makes it a little easier for at least me to search this thing and find my old posts which is part of the point. I started fidgeting with setting up the newsletter version of this too. There’s about thirty folks subscribed but it’s still a bit arduous so for now I’ll park it and pick it back up when I get a minute.

The Sailing Ship Effect

I was sent Frank Geels’ Technological transitions as evolutionary reconfiguration processes by Justin the other day as a neat segue into all the stuff I’ve been reading and writing about expectations and innovation recently. I immediately recognised a bunch of the diagrams – probably from Benque’s spam posting.

Geels, F. (2002). from *Technological transitions as evolutionary reconfiguration processes: a multi-level perspective and a case-study*. Geels’ diagram shows how ‘niches’ of ‘radical new technologies’ can break through to reshape the ‘landscape’. First by grouping together to form a critical mass then breaking the various linked barriers of the dominant regime’ technology, markets, infrastructure, policy, culture etc. and finally joining the landscape. Geels considers the landscape to be somewhat immutable technologies – roads, cars, cities etc.

Geels describes the way that technologies emerge from niches, travel through the dominant ‘technological regime’ made of markets, user preferences, legal and insurance policies and cultural meanings before becoming embedded in the landscape. In particular, his paper here focuses on the development of steam ships in the late 19th and early 20th century and how they went from niche applications in canals to mainstream use enabled by and enabling shifts in the physical and technological landscape to support them.

However, his account doesn’t acknowledge the role that imaginaries and expectation play in technological development. My work is about the imaginaries around so-called AI and the social imaginaries, expectations, hopes and fears of AI seen throughout popular culture and the media pre-date any actual technical applications of AI by decades. The imaginary of AI predates actual AI – arguably still. Now off the top of my head, I can’t recall a great popular culture imaginary of steam ships that predates their invention. There aren’t futuristic paintings from the 17th century showing alien looking steamers that I can think of. In fact, as Geels describes it, the steam ship was an incidental innovation that emerged as a product of social conditions (greater emigration, the desire for more regularity in shipping etc.) and trial and error. So when did the imaginative dimension of technological innovation start to emerge? When did technological innovation begin to be driven by in whole or in part, imaginative longing?

This may not be the answer but at one point he compares the way that wooden sailing ship building was seen as a craft with all the mysterious and esoteric tacit knowledges of an art form while steam ships were part of a scientific lineage:

While shipbuilding had always been a craft-profession, it gradually turned into an applied science, something upon which most shipbuilders initially looked with unveiled hostility.
Geels, F. (2002). Technological transitions as evolutionary reconfiguration processes: a multi-level perspective and a case-study

For instance, steam ships underwent prototyping, testing and other processes we might now take for granted in technological innovation but at the time were new methods. Wooden sail shipbuilding was assumed knowledge, passed down from masters to students with little reflection, questioning or innovation except over long time periods. Now, most technological innovations emerge from science and I tried to read Bernard Stiegler once to understand this but couldn’t so just take it as assumed knowledge.

So, I wonder to what degree scientific process and methods are better at inculcating imaginative new potentials? Loads of people have written about how the conditions of the laboratory and research setting prefigure certain priorities and futures and for instance in Karin Knorr Cetina’s work, how the specific ways of interpreting natural phenomena shape epistemology. Could we argue that craft, (broadly speaking) with a focus on demonstrable excellence in one particular type of task turns the imagination away from other possibilities that might emerge from technical processes? While scientific methods, with their emphasis on observation and experimentation are more fertile for new imaginaries?

Geels’ paper is known for incidentally describing the Sailing Ship Effect where advances in a new technology (steam ships in this case) force the existing dominant technological regime to innovate at an accelerated pace. Throughout the latter half of the 19th century, designers and shipbuilders suddenly found they were able to automate large parts of their vessels to reduce labour costs once the threat of more reliable and faster steamships became real.

Anyway, it’d be great to speculate that is what Instagram are doing by crowbarring in yet another ‘feature’ in the form of ‘Rooms’ but they’re not, they’re just flailing to keep up with Clubhouse. Instagram, if you’re reading, send some of your people to a design school.

Short Stuff

The Disco Elysium Final Cut is getting its release date this week for this month. I will be playing it again, I will be telling everyone all about it again.
Hopefully you’ve seen Claire Evans’ thoughtful and insightful writing on xenobots, but it’s here if you haven’t. This is one of those things that’s like the opposite of NFTs – genuinely interesting, exciting and challenging to our understanding with enormous possibility. Rather than just about acquiring capital.
There’s so much stupid stuff right now. It just feels stupid. Just like profoundly stupid when we were doing so well. One step forward, two steps back. What emerges from this global horror-cocoon in a few months to a year is going to be total shit because of all the stupid.
I’m still not doing enough PhD work, leave me alone.

Ok, that’s about the size of it this week. I need to edit a video, clean a bike before it rains and chunk through some emails I’ve been putting off. Love you, write again next week. Let me know if you wanna hang out.

Box 028: The Ends Justified the Means

20.01.21

DS023: Hair simulation! This is actually recreating a sketch I did years ago. I don’t like the grass. I think there’s something about the way it renders ribbons in Cycles that I don’t like.

It’s just sheer black out there. The window may as well just have blackouts over it. Some folks assembled some scaffolding at the weekend so every afternoon around two or three there’s some meaningful, concerned chatter and banging around. I’m not sure what they’re doing but I hope it involves better sunrises.

Well, happy pardon day! I’ve sort of been looking forward to it but now just feel sorry for all the editors with ‘historic self-pardon’ ledes ready to role. I expected it too. I suppose there’s still a few hours.

I suppose we all know that Trump coverage will continue for the foreseeable future. He’ll be courted by the populist arm of the Republicans for the mid-terms and incumbents in purple districts will live in fear of boat-shoe-fascist-grunt Don Jr.’s threat to fund primary opposition to any who fall out of line with Trumpism. The ideal situation would be one in which coverage of Trump recedes to the same awarded other far-right-failed-business-leader-sexual-predators rather than the spectacle of a bitterly enraged former president railing against everyone given call-ins on Fox and interviews on OAN for the next half a decade.

I can’t watch the rolling news. I suppose it’s the idea of a constant stream of people listing all the things they don’t know which turns me off. Most of my analysis comes either through a check of the news online first thing and podcasts where you can get a level of analysis and depth. In the case of US politics, most of that is through the Obama-bros’ Crooked Media empire and Pod Save America chiefly. But there’s something about American political satire which is quite friendly, it doesn’t have the venom of British satire. I suppose it’s not as confrontational. There has to be a punchline.

For other stuff – particularly Brexit – I adore Talking Politics which is based out of Cambridge University but it can be a bit difficult to want to listen to because it isn’t based on humour. In-depth long-term analysis of the shocks of Brexit and Covid or the immorality of Johnson and Trump are just anxiety-inducing without a rasp of even American satire to temper them.

Anyway, there was a particularly good analysis of long-term Brexit effects which was, yes anxiety inducing because of the inevitability of the pain to come. Generally, hosts and political scientists David Runciman and Helen Thompson tend to balance things pretty well. Recent episodes on Covid and Biden have been wary of hyping change or progress, neatly separating issues between the political and the systemic to highlight realistic opportunities to change and where there will be sticking points but this one on Brexit was just ‘it’s bad, it’s going to get worse.’ The guest, Diane Coyle, suggests there are five world-leading exports in the UK; financial services, artificial intelligence, green technology, higher education and the creative arts. And the government has, for political reasons, declared a culture war on the last two.

Incidentally – while I’m here – I still don’t get the fish, no one has explained why the fish was such a thing! No one even talks about the fact that it was such a thing! To this very day, journalists still write about what the deal means for the fishing industry and like someone turning up nude at a party that no-one will look at, talk about or explain, it’s just there; ‘Yeah that’s Simon.’ ‘Why is he not wearing any clothes?’ ‘Hm?’ ‘He’s not wearing any clothes, why is that?’ ‘Oh.’

Anyway, both Tory Brexiteers and moderate Republicans have started to build permission structures to excuse their collective inequities. In the case of the US, party figures are piping up to peddle the ‘you may not have liked his methods, but look at what he did’ argument. In the case of the UK a mix of Covid and a narrative of ‘EU viciousness’ is being set up to justify the failings of the thirty-year project of removing the UK from Europe. Both of these narratives appear both unfair and untrue to more left-leaning folks like myself. Particularly in the case of the US. I’d like to see one of the Republican mouthpieces on BBC News grilled as to how the complete inaction on Covid and the collapse of federal agencies which has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands can be interpreted as presidential achievement. Probably won’t happen, but these cover stories will no doubt continue to secure the thin minority rule by which both parties hold (somewhat fluctuating) power.

This is also why I’m skeptical of a post-Trump and/or post-Johnson reckoning in either party. For reasons already explained, their populist hold remains strong but also to their maximalist Reagan/Thatcherist ideology the ends always justify the means. I’ve argued (unpopularly) before that a reverence of norms, principles and moralism on the left prevents opportunism and compromise to achieve change. The almost explicit aim of the Republican party since Bush senior has been to secure the judiciary in order to concretise conservative and constitutionalist values for a generation. Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and the other party leaders have always been pretty open about not caring how that’s achieved. The whole point was to prevent progressivism getting to the courts and lock down conservative heartland issues for decades to come – gun rights, anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ rights and broadly white supremacist constitutional provisions.

Issues of deregulation and climate change are useful political footballs along the way and Trump and Brexit became neat opportunities to drum up political popular support for the more outsize causes of conservatives. I’m not sure we could point to the Tories as having such a cohesive multi-decade ideological project beyond the general jingoism and regressive imperialism that keeps the right-wing press excited but in both cases, parties which maintain minority rule require bending the ‘rules’ to maintain it; something which the left’s commitment to fairness generally prevents it from doing. Looking at how Biden (or in fact the dim, distant possibility of a left-wing UK government) approaches electoral reform will be an interesting tell. This won’t be a first hundred days project but the right-wing have demonstrated more than ever their willingness, to lie, break the law and deceive to secure election victory. I’m not suggesting the left should embrace the same guerrilla tactics but don’t mistake ‘fairness’ for complicit conservatism.

Short Stuff

I don’t normally go on political rants, I’m sure you know, but I haven’t been to the pub in ages.

There are 32 possible records in Mario Kart 64; one for each of the 16 tracks and one for the fastest lap of each track. Here’s the story of the person who over 8 years almost held them all simultaneously.
This Twittering from Sarah Brin reminded me of the story I’ve told before about FIFA buying player data from Electronic Arts. I’d like to see analysis of more ways, beyond the technological, that the video games industry impacts on other sectors like this but I don’t know where to find it.
The US Covid Relief bill had a clause giving 180 days for the Office for Naval Intelligence to release an unclassified report detailing what it knows about UFOs (via Matt Webb)
What are the good video game podcasts?

Ok, that’s it. There was more but there isn’t now. Listen, you know I love you. I haven’t had time to read anything yet in 2021 so I sort of have a deficit of interesting-ness right now. Speak to you soon.