Ken’s Blog

This evening we had a rather deep philosophical discussion about the difference between male and female hero narratives. As it happens, last night on my flight to Glasgow I saw the latest Transformers film Bumblebee.

This film is very much a woke feminist narrative. It centers on a young woman who works together with a Transformer character to save the world.

In our discussion this evening we contrasted the arc of this story with that of young Luke Skywalker. Luke, like young King Arthur before him, is, from birth, destined for greatness.

A fundamental trope of most male “hero’s journey” narratives is that the young man is born to greatness. Like Neo in The Matrix, in order to succeed he mostly needs to learn to accept his natural birthright.

But hero’s journey narratives with female protagonists often follow a different convention. Rather than seeing the hero as being born to greatness, the narrative generally develops along the lines of evolving character.

Our female protagonist is not a hero by birthright, but rather by force of personality. She becomes the hero who saves the world.

It seems that this difference is essential to understanding our unconscious gender bias. We readily extend to male heroes the mantle of royalty, yet we are not so generous with our female heroes.

But maybe in the long run that is better. After all, a hero who succeeds on her own is far more interesting than one who had a boost from culturally determined mythical or narrative magic.

May the fourth be with you!

I am currently at Newark International Airport with two of our Ph.D. students, waiting at the gate for a United Airlines flight that will take us to Glasgow, Scotland. For the next week I shall be immersed in the world of the annual conference of SIGCHI (the Special Interest Group of Computer/Human Interfaces, which is one of the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) SIGs (…)).

Sorry, nearly got caught in a recursion there. Where was I?

Oh right. Newark Airport. Looking around, I realize that I am situated in one of those odd liminal places that exists only to come from some other location in order to go to some other other location.

This is a place, but not a “place”. After all, nobody is really here because they want to be here. In fact, they are here precisely because they want to be someplace else.

Train stations, bus depots, taxi stands, these are all liminal places. But airports are different because of the sheer amount of time one tends to spend in them.

The nature of air travel requires you to wait before you can depart — and sometimes to wait a very long time. Being in airports may be the longest amount of time that I spend essentially being nowhere.

To me the most exciting news today was the discovery of ancient Denisovans far from the single small region where they were first found. I am not sure why I find this news to be so thrilling, but I do.

Perhaps because it is a welcome respite from the ordinary. People seem to spend so much time these days either griping about the current state of the world or else escaping into artificial fantasy universes.

Yet here is a discovery that is magnificent in its sheer temporal scale — a new window into the vast prehistory of our shared human heritage. It is also a mystery.

For what were these people like? What kind of language did they speak? What were their views on love? What sorts of ideas ran through those very large brains of theirs?

We may never know the answers to these questions. Yet in the simple act of asking, we are lifted out of the quotidian, and we find our sense of wonder restored.

Today, the first day of May, is the day when workers are celebrated in much of the world. Except of course in the United States, where Labor Day started in the first place.

The Haymarket Affair in Chicago in 1886 had paradoxically opposite effects in the U.S. and abroad. The administration of president Grover Cleveland, who was deeply pro-business and anti-union, played down the political significance of that day by deliberately avoiding any reference to early May, settling on the first Monday in September for the American commemoration of Labor Day.

Meanwhile, workers in other countries used the Haymarket Affair as a rallying cry for workers’ rights. Which is why International Workers’ Day is celebrated today in more than eighty nations around the world.

Interestingly, in the last few days our current administration has decided that up to 75 million U.S. workers may no longer qualify for worker benefits. I wonder how many of those workers are going to vote to reelect this president, not ever realizing what has just happened to them.

Grover Cleveland would have been impressed.

The other day I did what may be one of the nerdiest things I have ever done. I ordered a custom black t-shirt.

But not just any custom black t-shirt. Printed on this black t-shirt, in a monospace white font, is the code for the new and improved version of my noise function.

The print consists of about a dozen lines of fairly dense GLSL shader code. The code itself won’t mean anything to someone who isn’t a graphics programmer. Yet as a work of aesthetic expression, I think it will work for anyone.

I don’t think I did this primarily as a fashion statement. Rather, I think it was a way for me to memorialize, for myself, a particular personal achievement.

Of course other people will see the t-shirt when I wear it, so in a way it is, by definition, a communication with the world. Yet what it is communicating on the outside is mainly a reflection of a particular feeling that I have on the inside.

Come to think of it, isn’t that what fashion is all about?

Something about a
Haiku, makes me wish the world
Could learn to be terse

Happily, today my brilliant Ph.D. student Connor DeFanti defended his dissertation. He is now officially Dr. DeFanti.

During his presentation Connor used a number of words that have well known meanings in the field of computer science. For example, at one point he used the word “binary”. At another point he used the word “handshaking”.

Computer scientists usually use the word “binary” to denote the “base two” number system, in which every digit is either zero or one. “Handshaking” is generally used to describe the software protocol that allows two computer programs to communicate with each other.

But since Connor’s thesis was about shared virtual reality, he had alternate meanings for both of these words. In the case of “binary”, he was referring to “non-binary” avatars. In other words, in our shared VR worlds, participants are not required to appear as — or identify as — male or female.

In the case of “handshaking” he was referring to the distinction between what is possible in shared virtual worlds in the same physical room and what is possible in shared virtual worlds with remotely located participants.

The distinction between the two can be neatly described as follows: When two people are in the same physical room, they can shake each other’s hand.

Of course they can also engage in lots of other interesting activities together that two people can’t do unless they are in the same room. But from a computer science perspective, those other activities are all really forms of handshaking, to a first approximation.

Well, people seem to really like CAVE. Today I read a very nice article about it on techradar.

Last night at a small party thrown by Bose, we got to spend a lot of time in deep philosophical conversation with Paul of Felix and Paul. I’ve been a fan of their pioneering VR work for years, so it was fascinating to meet him and to get his perspective on all this.

Then this morning, of course, I made sure to watch the new Felix and Paul VR piece Gymnasia, which is also showing at Tribeca. It was beautiful, as well as disturbing in all the right ways.

I think people are really starting to figure out this medium. And that is not is not so easy, because it requires a new visual language.

After all, after the Lumiere brothers started to popularize projected cinema¹, eight more years had to pass before someone finally created the very first movie close-up². So I guess we are not doing so badly.

1. In 1895
2. The Great Train Robbery, in 1903

Today is the beginning of the Tribeca Film Festival, where for the next ten days we are showing CAVE as part of its VR program. This is particular exciting because CAVE is the world’s first (and so far only) immersive narrative for a collocated room-scale audience. Or, to put it a different way, a movie that transports an entire audience onto the Holodeck.

It was fun and exciting showing CAVE at Siggraph last summer, but Tribeca is a different thing entirely. Siggraph is a technical conference, whereas Tribeca is a major film festival.

To put it bluntly, the New York Times film critic is not going to show up at Siggraph. Which means that now our work is no longer just part of a technical conversation. It is now part of the cultural conversation.

What CAVE is really asserting in that cultural conversation is that a narrative experienced in VR should not merely be “a movie for one person”. Rather, it should be an experience that many people can share together, with all of the the age old magic that happens when people gather together to be told a story.

There have been some really supportive articles written about us showing up at Tribeca with CAVE. Here is one of them.

With any luck, the cultural critics who attend the festival will understand what we are up to, and will receive our work kindly.

Today a good friend of mine proudly emailed me a photo of his new membership card. He has just joined the Democratic Socialists of America.

I, of course, immediately emailed him this (slightly altered) excerpt from Monty Python’s Life of Brian:

REG: We’re the Democratic Socialists of America. Listen. If you wanted to join the D.S.A. you’d have to really hate the Republicans.

BRIAN: I do!

REG: Oh, yeah? How much?

BRIAN: A lot!

REG: Right. You’re in. Listen. The only people we hate more than the Republicans are the fucking American Democratic Socialists.

P.F.J.: Yeah…

JUDITH: Splitters.

P.F.J.: Splitters…

FRANCIS: And the American Popular Democratic Socialists.

P.F.J.: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Splitters. Splitters…

LORETTA: And the Democratic Socialists of America.

P.F.J.: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters…

REG: What?

LORETTA: The Democratic Socialists of America. Splitters.

REG: We’re the Democratic Socialists of America!

LORETTA: Oh … I thought we were the Popular Democratic Socialists.