Friends who aren’t strictly speaking, human
I know I’ve only been awake for like, an hour or whatever, but this is the most disturbing thing I’ve seen all day:
If you click here, you can go to the actual page
Her eyes follow your mouse around etc… in a whole-face-attention giving sort of way. Clever as fuck really… for comedic effect you can make your mouse buzz bee-like over her face. For some reason this gives me the creeps big time, but I just can’t stop myself from doing it.
Which just goes to show doesn’t it. The grammar of facial expression is probably even harder to do convincingly than written communication. Your eyes (if not windows on the soul exactly) are kindof windows onto your brain. If you think of something you’ve seen they go one way, if you think of something you’d like to see they go another… as if they were kindof looking into corners of your brain for clues.
So while it’s possible to create the facsimile of an expression to the extent that we know what the machine is trying to say… improving it to the point where we can’t tell that it’s not human, is probably going to be pretty tricky… and even trying to do it is probably an answer to what is ultimately the wrong question.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe what we want is exaggerated reality rather than reality itself… or a dynamic equilibrium between the two. Art (according to one Sri Ramachandra) is exaggerated reality - a reflection of reality with the parts that resonate with the human condition amped up… and I think pornography is probably the same thing.
NSFW
This for example (NSFW) is an example of an entire genre of pornography where the barbification of the models is pushed to the point of lunacy. It’s a step on a continuum - but has made the leap across the void from ruthless exfoliation and photoshop-smoothing, to abandoning the pretence that the models are human at all. And it doesn’t matter. People are still paying to wank over it.
So anyway. There you go. To get away from porn and sleaziness, back towards things more wholesome, decent and well… funny, check out the expressions on the two people in the photo below.
One of these people is actually a cat, and can do the facial expression thing as convincingly as an human I’ve seen, and proof that a cat will be a much better friend to you than a load of pixels, even if it does hate you.
