Humanistic science fiction: the uncanny valley and cartoon time

My brother Dermot is a ....well, was a... -is currently some new fangled title in the conceptual design film world. But I would have called him a conceptual designer other than that.

Anyway  - last time I met Dermot we talked about CGI. It's relevant to his industry, especially his latest films. And he told me about this interesting psychological trait of people: the uncanny vallley (eponymous website).

The uncanny valley seems to be the term for when something lifelike stops seeming cartoon-ish or comfortably fake and appears to hang between that and what is real. It's an uncomfortable feeling - a feeling of uncanniness. This applies especially to simulating human features - and in my view, most CGI animated human beings, especially Polar Express (imdb entry).

My version of it is all the cheap, nasty techno tracks I ended up seeing on MTV's 'The Mix' when I couldn't sleep. The characters moved too smoothly, the ground looked too blank; they moved smilingly through eerie and empty  no-places, their surroundings a furniture of no-things.

This eerieness, the sense of emptiness I get from these things, I suspect, is an indication of seeing exactly what these simulcra are. There is nothing there - a CGI of a woman crying does not feel anything, nor does a painting of a woman crying. Nor, incidentally, does a character in a story about a a woman crying.

What feels something is the author who drew, or programmed, or wrote. And if they fail miserably at their job the coldness of the medium pops up. So, some CGI is uncanny because we see the mechanics of what is representing. These mechanics appropriately dehumanise what is not human.

I think.

This would suggest things stop being eerie over time. They stop being discomfiting (discomforting?). By mere repetition of stimuli, and the absence of reasons to scream, run away, have sex, the familiar follows the strange.

This could be all wrong, however. There may be an absolute boundary.

Uncanny Claymation
I have always had a deep-rooted and sincere horror of all claymation other than Aardman. Creature Comforts (home page, imdb entry) is one of my favourite shows (and I can see there's an American version. Good for them!). But ALL OTHER CLAY BASED ANIMATION IS HORRIBLE.

For example,

"Ca bhfuil Ruairi Crainn?" arsa Gregory Grainnoig. "Ca Bhfuil-" [trans. (from Irish, from Gaeilge): "Where is Rory the Tree?", said Gregory the Hedgehog. "Where is-"]. Aghhh! Stay the hell away from me, you creepy monochrome mud-thing!

This was never in any Bosco script, but it should have been, because all I could think, on watching that claymation (made from 'marla' , as it is called in Ireland), was: "Why is there something moving over their skin?"

What I'm talking about is, I think, a direct result of how I claymation works. You have the clay/plasticine molded on to a wire frame. You film the thing* in one position, and then another. But in the process, on a low budget and strict time scales, you can't let the clay really cool in between shots, so the clay becomes a bit soft. Your handprints appear on it, and the surface becomes mushed here, bunched there, in different places from shot to shot. As a result, in a clay animal's motion, its limbs would slightly change shape, indentations would appear and disappear across its artificial skin. That unintended motion looked as real as the rest of the illusionary motion. For a kid watching it that's pretty real.

I think this is another example, then, of the 'uncanny valley' but this time with no reference to modern CGI. And, boy, did I hate it - much much much more than any modern animation distortions (probably only because I'm about 5 times the age).

I think there's this valley in our 'Theory of Mind' (as mind-theorisers call it: see Stanford Encyclopedia's entry on folk psychology  and eliminative materialism): how we understand the thinking of what someone (or something) does. There's a point where something that acts human but isn't is believable, but bring it closer and closer to humanity and it goes....strange. But enough of that for now, as I really do need to sleep.

Brief note on cartoons
I should also write about the baffling and strange 'world' cartoons, i.e. not American, not Disney - although, even if they were Disney, they usually seemed wrong: everything seemed to bob up and down a little, like they were elastic; not Hanna Barbera cartoons, the monochrome ones, which also disappointed me (might as well have shown stills) and not. Looney Tunes, which were just brilliant.

These other cartoons popped up on Sunday afternoon on Irish Television. The conclusions I reached from watching these, as a child,  creeped me out about reality beyond my small town. So, I remember thinking one day, sitting by  myself on a summer day in the dining room, surrounded by copy books and dead flying ants (that's another story). So...children from other places like to watch....Autobahn? This was on a few times on 'Cartoon Time' ; also, one about a girl who melted because she cried so much.

But I won't now, because I'm very tired. Only had four hours sleep last night, for no good reason. (I don't have a social life anymore).

Oh! I can play Tetris now I've internet at home!

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So, at some point in animation, things stop looking like cartoons and start looking like something real but.....wrong. It's a fascinating fact of how we perceive things, and is undoubtedly tied up with the fact that, given a convoluted but otherwise featureless blob, we see no pattern, but put in a a dot at any point in the blob, and - wallah - a face. This is the phenomenon of pareidolia (wikipedia entry)). Consider this:

So.....is there a face here? Is there?










Now, consider these two, all just that above with an extra dot put inside the shape:













Do you see a face straightaway, or do you have to look? And what are you doing in either case? What could have such a face (that only a mother blob could love)?

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*I can't call them 'figures'. I can't reify them, 'bring them into the same world' as my own like that. I. Don't. Want. Them. Here.

(My childish nightmares were filled with the breathless chatter of the Tongue Twister Twins. You want an image of them? Luckily, I can't find any.)

Humanist science fiction

So, what happens on a Friday here, in this libraries of libraries?

Nothing much.

I have been sick, however, the last week - and I took the last two days off just to get some cough-less sleep. I spent most of it knocked out, but also listening to the radio, watching a few films, and reading Doris Lessing's A Briefing before a Descent into Hell.

At one point in this book, I thought: what the hell is she on about? She's just giving me mystical nonsense rambling. I didn't know what the book was about when I started reading it and all that kept me going was that I'd read other books by her which I really liked.

Even though, there's something eerie about Lessing's books. I've not read her latest but from her reviews it sounds fascinating. It's about the origin of men - not the origin of humans, but the origins of men, when they are first born by originally women-only humans.

There's a certain strain of science-fiction/fantasy that seems to include Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Kurt Vonnegut, eh....Stansilaw Lem, and maybe just maybe Iain M. Banks (if he wasn't so obsessed with making stuff up). It's uh, uhm, it's - it's ahm, it's -

Science fiction I like. Ech...no.

I really don't know what it is. Sometimes, it seems you can draw a line through several authors in terms of some undefined quality. This author has alot of what that author has, but has less than what that author has, and so on. Going back to Lessing, when I talk about a sort of eerieness, I mean a sort humanistic eerieness. And if there is a scale for such a thing, I think you can put Atwood on it, as well as Vonnegut, Lem, and Huxley. I think Banks drifts a little, and tends toward something else. His people are not ps - that's it.

By humanistic eerieness, I'm thinking of people being psychologically different but enough like us that we can feel that difference. We feel stretched by the writing.

I get that much more with Lessing than Atwood (though I think Margaret Atwood is the best living writer I can think of at the moment). Every time I read Lessing, I feel like I'm ably occupying the viewpoint of compassionate people who make me cold. But I still want to do that. I - eh, I -

Shikasta was a book by Lessing that was just lying about the house in Dungarvan when I was in college. I suppose it was Winifred's, as Lessing apparently is noted for being a feminist (why? Because she doesn't write about weddings?). I was reading Gene Wolfe for a while at the time, and really liking it -

Ah, wait - right. Okay, this is what it is about Banks vs. this lot I'm mentioning. Wolfe reminds me of it: Gene Wolfe's characters are humans living in a far off future; so, pretty much, are Banks'. Yet, for much of it, they are very familiar, very, contemporary. I feel I could talk to them, to some degree. Their technology would be different, but they would be - no no no that's not it at all.

Maybe it's that the Banks' beings are unreflective - there's a sealed aspect, a cap to their questioning, or to the potential for answers. The universe is explicable, mysterious only insomuch as the complexity of process, not in terms of the categories of things in it. In Banks, particularly, I feel at least, on having read his stuff, that a star is a star, a planet a planet, a person a person; computers are also people - his Minds - but that's like his one single trick. The idea a star would think, ech...nonsense. That's not science realfiktion.* I've found, on reading Banks, really entertaining and great stuff, but it doesn't always seem to cohere. So, the volcano ride in - that one about the suicide bomber - is very funny, and the ending of that book is bitterly touching (and viciously vengeful right after, incidentally, as if he needed to let his less developed readers come), but the.... well, the metaphysics is dull. The sublime - now that's interesting. No, it's just there. Maybe that's what I don't like about it - Banks is a sceptic and builds it into his narratives.

Something like that drove me nuts about Aasimov's foundation series: look, there's the hard sciences and then, oooh, the psychological sciences. Hmm...I suppose I just don't like the idea that things can be thought of in terms of our current (or a particular) categories of thought.

Anyway, this doesn't help at all in understanding Lessing, Atwood, Vonnegut et al. One thing about them as writers is they strive to be clear - except for the bit in Lessing when she was rambling about earth being a mote, but nevermind. But that's it! That's it! These authors are just good writers! Even if what they're saying is as implausible or obscure as other writers, they're trying to make it as clear as possible.

George Orwell wrote an absolutely brilliant paper on clarity. It's in a book I have called Identity and Anxiety. And he basically says: writers try to put words to things, and they struggle to find the right words. The struggle is to be as clear and simple as possible. If you want to be a good writer, that is what you should do. Bad writers think big words, complex sentences etc. make good writing. And then he quotes a load of academic papers, thereby taking the piss out of academia, which is always necessary.

I really like Iain M. Banks. I enjoy his books, but I suppose I feel he is doing something like that. It's not words so much as ideas or references to things. After reading several of his books, I get mainly the impression that the worlds he creates are only as big as the books. They don't stretch past them. Notably that huge thing - a Dark Wind or whatever it's called, where a fleet is invading a solar system and the people can see the lights of their engines in the heavens for decades before they arrive (which is a brilliant idea). It's got beautiful ideas with annoying characters, all of which disappear on finishing the page, as if one wakes from a dream...(perhaps that's the point).

*This is my moronic attempt to adapt the term 'realpolitik' to science fiction.