Finding signs of life in the uncanny valley
Watching videos of Sora stealing a box of chicken nuggets by Michael Jackson or Sora by Sam Altman biting into the pink flesh of a flame-grilled Pikachu has brought back some nostalgia for me. ed atkins exhibition I saw it at Tate Britain a few months ago. Atkins is one of the most influential and volatile British artists of his generation. He is known for his highly-detailed CG animations of himself (pore-perfect skin, junky movements) that play with virtual representations of human emotions.
Courtesy: The Artist, Cabinet Gallery, London, Dependence, Brussels, Gladstone Gallery
In worm We see a CGI Atkins making a long distance call to his mother during a Covid lockdown. The audio is from a recording of the actual conversation. Are we seeing Atkins crying or his avatar? Our attention keeps moving between two realities. Atkins said, “When an actor breaks character during a scene, it’s called corpse-killing.” “I want everything I make to be dead.” Next to Atkins’ work, generative videos look like cardboard cutouts: lifelike but not lifelike.
A dark and dirty book about talking dingoes
What’s it like to have a pet? The debut novel by Australian author Laura Jean Mackay, animals in that countryWill give you a wish you never asked for. Pandemics like flu cause people to lose the ability to hear what animals are saying. If this sounds too Dr. Dolittle for your tastes, rest assured: These animals are weird and dirty. Sometimes they don’t make any sense at all.
Accountant
With everyone talking on their computers now, Mackey’s book recaptures the anthropomorphic trap we’ve all fallen into. It’s a brilliant evocation of what can happen in a nonhuman brain.,and attention to the difficult boundaries of communication.
