Ken’s Blog

“OK, I get it, we need to figure out what the riddle is before we can solve it.” Jenny said. “But how do we figure out that the riddle is?”

“Mr. Symarian, can you help us out here?” Josh said.

“I’m terribly sorry,” the teacher said, “but I cannot help you with this part of your journey.”

“No disrespect Mr. Symarian, but that’s kind of lame,” Jenny said. “I mean, we came all this way.”

“Yeah,” Josh added. “To get this far I had to find us a path through the freakin’ fourth dimension. And now you won’t even help with a stupid riddle?”

“It is not that I will not, but that I cannot. The riddle is a pathway. Your grandmother Amelia was young when she created it, and as the creation of a young mind, the pathway can be traversed only by young minds. Were I to attempt to provide any assistance, the way forward would disappear forever.

“Well ok then,” Josh said, taking a deep breath. “Jenny, I think we need to look around the room for clues.”

Last week at a conference I was listening to an intense diatribe by an artist who was positing that the availability of instant on-demand interactive media — the web, Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, and all that — would be the death knell for good old fashioned book reading.

During the question and answer session that followed, a man in the audience started out a rather long question with the quote: “Language is an old-growth forest of the mind.” I was struck by the wit of this quote, so while he was formulating his question I typed that phrase into Google and found out that it was by the anthropologist Wade Davis (whom I had never heard of). That led me to the Wikipedia page about Wade Davis, from which I learned that Davis had written an influential and controversial book in 1985 called “The Serpent and the Rainbow”. I then went to Amazon.com and put the book in my shopping cart. By the time the guy had finished his question, I was already queued up to read this book.

I did all this reflexively, without pausing to think about the process, but afterward it occurred to me that my experience was a direct refutation of the central point of the talk. I don’t read less because of these internet-enabled connections. I read more. There is an intriguing interaction between my reading time — something I do in solitude when at leisure — and my real-time acquisition of knowledge about new topics to explore, something that would not have been possible before the age of the internet.

The title of this post is from another quote by Wade Davis, one I find particularly inspiring and oddly relevant: “The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.”

“OK,” Jenny said, “Let’s take this slow. When you say ‘riddle’, what exactly do you mean?”

“Well,” Mr. Symarian said, looking somewhat abashed, “Were I to tell you, in some explicit way, then it wouldn’t be a riddle, would it?”

“Are you for real?” Josh said. “I mean, is there some kind of script we don’t get to read or something?”

“No, nothing like that,” the teacher said. “It’s more of a quest sort of thing. One requires a certain purity, as it were, to pierce the veil of space-time. It wouldn’t do to provide a cheat sheet.”

“So you’re saying,” Jenny jumped in, “If I’m getting this, that if I want to get my grandmother back, I don’t just need to solve the riddle, I need to figure out what the riddle is in the first place.”

“Well, yes,” Mr. Symarian said. “That is the essence of it.”

“Damn,” said Josh. “This is harsh. It’s like when you’re supposed to know that ‘Lord of the Rings’ is all about Sam versus Gollum, and the rest, Aragorn and whatever, is just noise. They don’t tell you that going in.”

“Right,” Jenny said, warming to the theme. “Or that Harry, Hermione, Ron and all those other annoying kids are just window dressing, because Snape is really the only important character. The stuff that you don’t figure out until maybe the third book.”

“Exactly,” Mr. Symarian said. “Or, to revisit the classics, that fact that the entire narrative arc of Buffy is merely background for the passion of Giles.”

The two teenagers stared at him. “You’re, um, joking, right?” Jenny said.

Mr. Symarian sniffed. “You children will understand when you are older.”

I was really excited to read the thoughtful comments on my post about Animation as Live Theatre. I completely agree with Alec’s observation that puppets are to animation as theater is to film. And that would be all there is to it, in a pre-computer world.

Heather gave a wonderful description of cyber-puppetry, framing it as a kind of performative Turing test. But not exactly the Turing test, because in the scenario she describes, there is indeed a live human performer in the real-time loop, remotely operating a puppet through the internet.

All four commenters alluded to what I was really getting at — that the introduction of computers allows us to think seriously about non-trivial automatons as real-time performers. In other words, get the human performer out of the real-time performance loop.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying get the human out of the loop entirely. Computers don’t have aesthetic judgement — they are merely machines that do what we humans program them to do. What I’m saying is that there is an opportunity to use computers to evolve puppetry in new and exciting ways.

Generally speaking, a computer graphic or robot puppet can be infused with human performance chops in one of two ways: (1) Before the performance starts, and (2) While the performance is taking place. Traditional puppets operate almost entirely via (2). I say almost entirely because well designed marionettes do indeed have “talent” built into them, by virtue of how they are weighted and strung, which can cause them to move in ways that can look remarkably alive. Well designed marionettes shift and balance their weight by dint of the physics that is literally constructed into them.

Computers allow us to increase this “before the performance aesthetics” manyfold. We can think of a cyber-puppet as a blank slate that can be infused with ways of moving, of gazing, of walking and speaking. And we can think of the person who imparts these qualities into cyber-puppets as a kind of acting coach.

This concept is well understood in the field of electronic music. For years, computer software has been used to allow modern jazz composers to pre-train their computers. Such already-trained cyber-instruments allow a real-time performance to bring out riffs, sequences, inversions, arpeggiations and modulations that were programmed in beforehand. Unlike a traditional musical instrument (such as a piano or cello), a cyber musical instrument behaves in a way that reflects the complex musical ideas of its programmer, and therefore can actively interact with a performer in interesting and sometimes surprising ways.

It’s not that such a cyber musical instrument is “talented”. We don’t need to anthropomorphize here. It’s just that it has been pre-trained by a talented musician/composer who has programmed in her own musical choices. One of the first people I know of who did this for music in really interesting ways was Laurie Spiegel, with her revolutionary 1985 software Music Mouse. When you create music with Music Mouse, in a sense you are always collaborating with Laurie, because her aesthetic methods and choices continually inform the music you make.

It might be time to try to create a sort of “Drama Mouse” — a technology that does for computer enhanced interactive cyber actors what Laurie Spiegel did a quarter of a century ago for the computer enhanced performance of music.

Jenny circled around the bed, looking at her grandmother lying there. Although it seemed impossible that this was her grandmother. She recognized the face from the old photos, but her grandmother Amelia should have been old. This was a woman in her twenties.

“What do you think we should do?” Josh asked, unconsciously speaking low, as if he were in church. “Should we wake her up?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Jenny said despairingly. For some reason, she felt like crying. “After all this time, and everything we’ve been through, I really don’t know how to reach her.”

“It may be easier than you think,” said Mr. Symarian. “One could say that you are practically staring the answer in the face.”

“Right in the face?” Jenny said, rolling her eyes. “What is this, some kind of riddle?”

“Well, yes,” said their teacher. “I believe it is.”

Live theatre has something that film does not have — it is live. An audience seeing a play is in a unique moment in time, together with the actors up on the stage. If the mood of the audience changes, the performance itself will change, as the cast picks up on that changing mood and reflects it back across the footlights.

There is no equivalent in film. Every time you see Casablanca, or The Godfather, as magnificent as those films are, you will see exactly the same performances, the identical artistic choices. A film is a frozen artifact, a fixed point in aesthetic space, not an organic entity that interacts with its audience.

In this way, animation is of course like film. Every time you see Toy Story or Princess Mononoke, you are seeing exactly the same performances.

But what if animation could be more like theatre? What if the virtual actors could improvise, based on audience response? Would it still feel like watching an animated film, or would it start to feel more like live theatre?

Computer games do something vaguely similar, but they generally do not privilege deep and psychologically engaging characters. What if we wanted real-time animated performances, right on our computer screens, of stories about characters with emotional depth and resonance? As Janet Murray asked back in 1997, will we ever get Hamlet on the Holodeck?

Charlie and Sid were waiting nervously outside in the hall. Charlie was pacing up and down the hallway, and Sid was flying back and forth from wall to wall, looking very distraught.

“Do you think they’ll be ok?” Charlie asked.

“How the hell would I know,” Sid growled, “What am I, the answer demon?”

“Well, you don’t need to snap at me,” Charlie said.

“Sorry kid,” Sid said. “I get upset, I get nervous. It’s a thing with me. Don’t take it personal.”

“Yeah,” Charlies said, “I guess we’re all on edge. I mean, anything could happen now.”

“Sheesh, you’re tellin’ me,” Sid said. “people wandering around in too many dimensions, time tying itself into a pretzel. It’s enough to make your horns drop off.”

“Well,” Charlie said, “you know, that isn’t really so bad.”

Sid stared for a moment. “Oh right, I forget, I’m talkin’ to a guy who was one of those fake demons. Not that there’s, you know, anything wrong with that,” he added hastily. “I mean, no offense intended.”

“None taken,” Charlie said.

My aunt Sylvia passed away yesterday. She was 93 and had lived a full and glorious life. We are all rearranging our schedules to fly down to attend the funeral.

Some people change in radical ways as they get older, but my memories of aunt Sylvia from my earliest childhood are completely consistent with my sense of the person she continued to be to the end of her life. She was always smart, cheerful, outgoing, generous and full of joy, with a genuine and uncomplicated love of people. I know that sounds too good to be true, but in her case it is exactly true.

In recent times I have stood witness as too many people were taken from this earth in untimely ways. People who were in the middle of getting things done, who were far from having finished the mission they had set about to accomplish. Those cases of life interrupted are always deeply tragic. One comes away with a sense that something has been unfairly stolen.

But I get a different sense when I think about aunt Sylvia. I am sad for us, that we will no longer have the pleasure of her cheerful presence, yet I feel that she indeed got a chance to accomplish her mission. In a way it was a straightforward mission: To connect with people, to fully enjoy those connections, and to find joy in life and in loving the people around her.

It’s something that sounds so simple to say, yet many people have a hard time keeping hold of that joy. It was part of aunt Sylvia’s genius was that she never made that mistake. Even when my uncle passed away — her first and only love and inseparable companion for over sixty years — she managed to bounce back and throw herself into her love for her children and grandchildren.

Sometimes when life gets complicated, and I become distracted by the sheer amount of nonsense that a day can throw at me, I temporarily forget what a great privilege it is just to be here. In such times it’s good to think about a person who never lost sight of that simple and profound truth — my late wonderful aunt Sylvia.

Jenny was starting to get the hang of it. If you turned this way twice, it was the same as turning that way three times. There were patterns to moving in higher dimensions, even if it seemed crazy. She had the thought that it was a little like finding yourself in a strange new kind of Rubik’s cube. You didn’t really need to understand what each individual turn meant, as long as you learned the patterns.

Maybe, she thought, this is what magic incantations are all about. The reason an incantation doesn’t seem to make any sense is that we can’t see the space it works in — because it’s not the space we live in. An incantation is really a kind of map — each line, when spoke aloud, turns something in just the right way, and by the time it’s done, you’re there.

She never would have believed in magic incantations, of course, if she hadn’t seen them working with her own eyes. In a way it was reassuring to realize that magic is really just physics in a different world. In a way, she mused, it’s so much more comforting to think that there really are rules about these things. She thought of something she’d read in a comic book once, a line she’d really liked. Except now she’d say it differently: “With great power comes the need for a great sense of direction.”

She saw Josh and Mr. Symarian staring at her, and she realized she had said it aloud. But before she had time to be embarrassed, the teacher spoke up. “Yes, quite,” he said. “I believe you have caught the essence of it. And I am pleased to say,” he added, nodding toward Josh, “that our young friend here has an exceedingly fine sense of direction.”

It was only in that moment that Jenny realized that they were back again in normal three dimensions. They were standing in a small room, empty but for a very lovely queen size bed. And on that bed, apparently fast asleep, was her grandmother Amelia.

Rather than write just one daily post,
I could write two — or three at the most.

Writing more posts could really be fun,
Although I’d upload just the one.

The others I would set aside,
And then one day, when I have died,

Even though I’d gone away,
I could keep blogging, once a day!