Ken's Blog

“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!

As the years went by, Amelia found it harder and harder to remember how to act “normal” about time. Although she always knew when it would happen, she found it unpleasant when her husband would catch her staring off into space, and she would see that look of vague fear upon his face.

It was easier with the children. They seemed to understand the hidden world that everyone keeps inside, and how different it is from that world created by grownups, of days and weeks, of time diced into meaningless little calendar boxes. There was a point when she began to wonder whether growing up is a kind of forgetting, an erasing of the ability to see how time is a sculpture, a world of beautiful shapes carved forever into the fabric of the Universe.

Sometimes she wished they could see what she saw — past and future twisting together, frozen moments stretching as far as the eye could see, like glistening stalactites in a beautifully wrought cave of ice. But there was no way to show anyone, nobody to tell who would have the slightest idea what she was talking about.

And so, as the years went by, she spent more time with the shadow, as she knew she would. Until one day, when the time came to make a choice.

I was having dinner with some good friends this evening, and the subject came up of the question of the “artist” mindset versus the “scientist” mindset. Questions from that discussion are still rattling around in my head.

I’ll just say, right at the outset, that I don’t believe there are two different subspecies of human that can be labeled “artist” or “scientist”. Rather, such identities are part of a dialectic that operates within every individual mind. When you are thinking like a scientist, you are concerned with mechanism: “How does this work? What are the operating principles here? What do I need to build to get from here to there?”

In contrast, when you are thinking like an artist, you are focusing on the deeper meaning itself, and the mechanism is merely a tool to get you there.

The myth that the “artist” and “scientist” are different people is quite prevalent in our society. So much so, that many people are surprised when the myth is questioned. There are many social structures that reinforce this myth. Children are told, from the time they are little, that they need to self-define with a narrow identity. Academic and professional societies are structured in a way that forces a “scientist” to act in a particular way, and punishes professional behavior that seems too “artistic”. Science is not supposed to ask “why”. Yes, an individual scientist can be socially responsible — this is actually encouraged. But this concern with outcomes is not considered part of the process of science itself.

Similarly, to succeed in the art world, one needs not to be seen focusing on the means by which things are done, but rather on the larger purposes and meaning. Starting in the second half of the twentieth century, Clement Greenberg and other influential voices in the art world called upon a renunciation of “mere technique”, in favor of a concept of art that rises above technical means, and focuses rather on ideas expressed, independent of the means used to express those ideas.

And so art and science have formed themselves into two opposing ghettos, each trapped by its own self-imposed limitations.

In my view, “art” and “science” are really two sides of the same coin. Within any individual, the practice of each is impoverished without the practice of the other. Great artists tend to be inventors, and great scientists tend to be driven by a higher purpose that is somewhere on the spectrum from romantic to spiritual.

Frank Capra was constantly inventing new techniques on the set to express his films, which was not surprising, since he had a Ph.D. in Engineering. He self-defined primarily as an artist — which means he was more concerned with getting the shot, and capturing an emotion on film, than he was with how he got it done. Nonetheless, Capra was perfectly comfortable tapping into his scientist self to refine and improve upon the techniques of cinema. The artist within him did not squelch the scientist within him, and this was part of the reason for the great effectiveness of his films.

Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman, among other great physicists, were driven by a larger sense of purpose, of beauty, of intrinsic meaning in the universe around them. When they were identifying and communicating those ideals to others, they are being artists. When they are implementing those ideals by developing mathematical bridges to greater understanding of the workings of the Universe, they were being scientists.

Leonardo da Vinci was of course artist and scientist both, in a way that was so completely integrated that it is impossible to draw a line between those complementary aspects of his creative genius.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had the courage to teach our children to follow in his footsteps?