Anthropreneur

Yesterday Ed Kramer, formerly of George Lukas’s Industrial Light + Magic, delivered an amazing lecture on the history of computer graphics before the Boulder Digital Arts Salon. From Lee Harrison’s seminal insight that came upon him while he was watching a TV signal shrinking to a dot to the first analog computer images (with one guy prancing in real time like in a theatre of shadows and the other moving the knob or joystick to control the beams of light) to Qantel, Abekas, Crawford and RenderMan and the production of first rendered 3D images and to finally Werewolf’s attempt at a complete simulation of a human being, the whole evolution of a new technology rolled before my eyes. The very first primitive analog images looked remarkably similar to what anthropologists find in ancient cave dwellings. It took a while before humans mastered a perspective; 3D images also came in relatively late. It means that the evolution of art everywhere proceeds according to the same master plan. The difference is that evolution speeds up on each new level making it possible for people like Ed Kramer to witness during his lifetime the same amount of change that used to take thousands of years to unfold. Another thing I noticed was the precision with which teams of digital artists measure the actual landscape or the movements of a living creature before embarking on “motion capture.” This reminded me of us, anthropologists, who get out there to do ethnographies in order to capture those intangible feelings and patterns of thought that we eventually try to simulate in an academic or industrial setting. Are we ever going to be able to simulate a human being on the screen (a “celebrity” would then simply patent his or her physique and then collect royalties from each movie while engaged in a more sophisticated social activity), to genetically engineer a human clone and to predict human behavior, or we will always be that close but no cigar?