Ken’s Blog

I really liked Weston’s comments on my previous post on this topic. A movie has always been a experience to visit for relatively brief periods of time (at least, if we are talking only about mainstream movies). Yet it seems that in recent years, filmed fictional narrative has been preparing for the advent of complete immersion — for the visual equivalent of getting lost in a novel.

We are now very much in the age of long form filmed narrative, of The Sopranos, of Breaking Bad, House of Cards and A Game of Thrones. Nearly two decades ago in the U.S., Buffy the Vampire Slayer was practically unique in having sustained multi-year narrative and character arcs. Now everyone else seems to be catching up to Joss Whedon.

If we end up losing the frame — and if, as Ridley Scott posited in Blade Runner, the camera position can shift even as you watch — will this complete the transition of cinematic art from the long short story to the full fledged novel? Are we witnessing parallel developments of narrative form and technical enablement?

Technically, we are not quite there yet. Our cameras are now able to capture movies in full 360 surround, but the audience of those 360 movies cannot quite yet wander freely around the set. To do that, we will essentially need to create a fusion of cinema and high quality computer graphics, in which the set will be stored as a representation of itself in the form of a high quality textured 3D model.

Of course this is the approach that has been continually evolving for years in high end computer games. Not coincidentally, such games are generally constructed as long-form narratives, in which a fictional world is meant to be experienced — and explored — over the course of days or even weeks.

Maybe that’s why Joss Whedon has taken on the Avengers movies. He might be angling sometime in the next few years to come full circle back to what he started in Buffy: Writing and directing the first truly long form fully immersive cinematic novel. And he might just pull it off, given that he has the financial might of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures behind him.

I just heard the tragic news that John and Alicia Nash were killed yesterday in an automobile accident. The obituary in the NY Times is already on-line.

I got to spend some quality time with the two of them at the 2012 Hamptons Film Festival, where I introduced and interviewed them as part of a screening of A Beautiful Mind. They were both among the most fascinating, yet enigmatic, people I’ve ever met.

They couldn’t have been more different from each other, and they fit together perfectly. Both were brilliant, but there the similarity stopped. John was the consummate gentleman, quietly polite, diffident and deeply thoughtful, more than a little awkward in a charming way. Alicia, on the other hand, was a real hoot, a total force of nature. She was clearly aware of the somewhat out of control media whirlwind going on around the two of them — she seemed quite protective of her husband — and you could tell that she missed nothing.

There was, in fact, a lot of odd energy at the festival. I think it was partly because when people think of John and Alicia Nash, they usually think of the actors in the Ron Howard film, and many festival attendees were seeing these two brilliant and elegant and rather private people as some sort of connection to Hollywood glamour.

Which was, of course, not quite accurate, but that is the nature of these events. At one point the three of us were discussing this strange energy between the film and the reality. I told them that one of the festival organizers had at first wanted me to interview only John, but that I had insisted on interviewing them both together. The film was, after all, essentially a love story, based on their own astonishing real life romance.

Alicia smiled at her husband, aware that people at the festival were somehow conflating him with Russell Crowe, and her with Jennifer Connelly. “Yes,” she said, “After all, I was the one who won the Academy Award.”

Think for a moment about the deal between photographer and audience. A photo is a set of choices, the deliberate selection of a moment, of frame, lighting and viewpoint. All of these choices are the prerogative and responsibility of the artist. Cinema has a similar ethic. No matter how many times you see a given cut of Blade Runner, you will see the same sequence of images. The aesthetic choices have been baked in.

What Ridley Scott was up to, I think, in the famous “Enhance 224” scene, was a challenge. He was asking us to question the definition of “image”. What if an image were not merely an image, but rather a universe of possible images? This would fundamentally change the relationship between artist and audience.

This doesn’t mean that creators would cede all control. For example, a sculpture can be seen from an infinite number of viewpoints, yet sculpture is still a medium that gives enormous control to the artist.

Rather, I think Ridley Scott was hinting at a possible future for cinema itself. Suppose you could enter into the world of Blade Runner, peer around its corners, see some of Sebastian’s other creatures, maybe even visit the out-world.

In more than one sense Ridley Scott was being a visionary. Because now, more than three decades later, the capabilities hinted at in that scene are just beginning to become possible.

Deckard: Enhance 224 to 176. Enhance, stop. Move in, stop. Pull out, track right, stop. Center in, pull back. Stop. Track 45 right. Stop. Center and stop. Enhance 34 to 36. Pan right and pull back. Stop. Enhance 34 to 46. Pull back. Wait a minute, go right, stop. Enhance 57 to 19. Track 45 left. Stop. Enhance 15 to 23. Give me a hard copy right there.

The above is the entire dialog of one of the greatest scenes in all of movies. In a way, it is about movies. The scene starts out with deceptive simplicity. Harrison Ford, as the classic brooding anti-hero shamus on a case, is nursing a stiff drink and peering at some sort of electronic photo enlarger. He issues commands, the machine zooms and pans in response.

Except that he doesn’t say “pan” — he says “track”. Filmmakers know that this means “move the camera”, not “turn the camera”. And it’s something you cannot do with a photo enlarger.

We don’t really notice this odd terminology at first. After all, what we are seeing is so familiar, so much like the panning across a shot that we are used to. Then the view seems to look around a corner, which is impossible.

But wait — it’s not looking around a corner, just zooming into a mirror in the photo. All perfectly reasonable. Sure, the photograph must be super-high resolution for him to be able to zoom into a reflection like that, but why not? This is a sci-fi movie after all.

And then, near the very end, Ridley Scott drops the other shoe. Deckard says “Track 45 left.” And unmistakably, astoundingly, the camera tracks to the left, as though the person taking the photo had literally moved sideways.

At that moment, my friend Josh and I, seeing the film together in the cinema, both practically jumped out of our seats. It was a moment that changed everything. And continues to change everything, even today.

More tomorrow.

In her comment on one of my posts the other day, Sally plausibly assumed that my Pad zoomable interface was influenced by Blade Runner. In fact, Pad evolved from an obsession I had back in 1979 to create a portable device that would show zoomable maps, to be stored as successions of tiled images with progressively doubled resolution.

It wasn’t until 1989 that I finally got my hands on a computer fast enough to let me build a good real-time demo of the concept — my first implementation of the Pad zoomable interface. The paradigm of zooming through the use of powers-of-two tiles gradually spread, particularly after David Fox and I published a SIGGRAPH paper about it in 1993, and eventually became used for lots of things, such as Google Maps.

Of course there was nothing new about zooming, even back then. Kees Boeke’s book Cosmic View, published in 1957, had famously inspired two wonderful films by Ray and Charles Eames. My additions were the use of this paradigm for a general purpose computer/user interface, and the use of powers-of-two tile storage to make it all practical.

To my mind, the wondrous “Enhance 224 to 176…” scene from Blade Runner — one of my favorite scenes from any movie — which superficially seems to suggest a Pad-like paradigm, is actually evocative of something vastly (and excitingly) different. More on that tomorrow.

To misquote Sarah Silverman, programming is magic. And by this I mean something very specific.

In the physical world we use tools to help us build things. But the things we build are still made out of relatively stupid materials. No matter how well made is a hammer or a saw, a piece of wood is still a piece of wood. It doesn’t know anything about what you are going to create out of it, and it can’t help you very much, other than by acting exactly like a piece of wood.

Programmers learn to see things differently. When you program, you are really mainly in the business of building very smart materials — objects that know all sorts of things about how you will assemble them together, and that can actively help you to build with them.

If a piece of wood were a software object, it would already know how to align itself perfectly with other pieces of wood, to create a set of notches in itself for making a dovetail joint, or how to ensure that any nails or screws you drive into it will always land in exactly the right place.

And once a single piece of wood knows how to do all of those things, then every piece of wood also gains the same knowledge. If you try to think of analogous situations in the physical world, the closest parallel is to the laws of magic.

Sometime in the coming decades, when we are all living in an eccescopically enhanced world, in which atoms and bits blend much more seamlessly than they do today, the way people construct things in the physical world will become ever more aligned with the way that programmers already think about creating things.

Imagine someone from today’s world, suddenly transported to that future time. They would look the way every day things were constructed, and they would think that they had entered a world of pure magic.

This is my first day in Paris. I am here for a four week stay, with occasional side trips to places like Cologne, Dublin and Tübingen. As long as I qm, you know, in the neighborhood. 🙂

And not just Paris. I am staying in a swank Haussmainnian flat (you could look it up) in the 17th Arrondissement. It’s one of those places where you look around and think “Wow, what a large and lovely and elegant apartment!”, and congratulate yourself on lucking out. Then you happen to open another door, and you say “Oh my god, there’s a whole other master bedroom and bathroom!”

Speaking as a Manhattanite, where the words “apartment” and “closet with running water” are used interchangeably, this place has some serious Mojo.

Yet in moments when I am truly honest with myself, I realize that this all feeds my inner nerd. I know that I will spend hours roaming the City of Lights, crossing Pont Neuf, wandering through Le Marais, communing with the statues at the Musée Rodin.

And then I’m going to come back here and get some serious programming done.

 

 

cat foo | sort -n +2 | awk '{if ($3 > 0) print}'

Ceci n’est ce pas une pipe.

 

 

This evening I read yet another article about our cultural obsession with machines that come to life and then want to take over the world. There is a long tradition of this sort of thing in Western literature.

From the Golem to Frankenstein’s creature to Maria in Metropolis to Robots, HAL, Cylons, Replicants Terminators and on and on and on, our culture seems obsessed by the idea that we will one day create an artificially intelligent being that will then displace us.

Yet I have not seen any compelling evidence that such a thing is even possible. From an empirical standpoint, the notion of a machine that would “want” to be human — or that would want anything at all, in the sense that we generally understand that word — has no correlate in reality.

There are many SciFi fantasies that we clearly understand to be metaphoric, from time machines to faster than light travel. When we talk about any of these devices, we generally understand that we are merely using a convenient literary convention.

So why is the Golem fantasy different? Why is it that every time we see another fantastical A.I. tale from a writer’s imagination, whether 2001 or Her or ex Machina, we debate about it as though discussing something as immediate and real as tomorrow’s weather?

Apparently some cultural neurosis compels us to wait for Frankenstein’s monster to walk through the door. But that doesn’t mean anyone is actually on the other side of the door.

This evening I went with friends to see the Berlin Philharmonic. It was all wonderful.

But when Yuja Wang came out to play Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2, it all went somewhere far beyond wonderful. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a powerful experience at an orchestral performance.

Prokofiev’s second piano concerto is a work of intense emotion. He wrote it in memory of a close friend who had committed suicide, and he essentially wrote it twice — the second time after the original orchestral score was destroyed in a fire following the Russian revolution.

Yuja Wang played the piece as though she was possessed. It was astonishing to see and hear so much emotional power flow from a single human being, particularly one so young.

Meanwhile, the orchestra and conductor Paavo Jarvi clearly understood that something extraordinary was happening, and they rose to the occasion magnificently. The interaction between pianist, conductor, orchestra and enraptured audience was a thing of pure beauty.

It was one of those moments that make you realize how truly fortunate you are to be alive.