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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.12 - MARCH 2001

Standing at the Crossroads (continued from page 4) After that, Jane White of Protozoa (http://www.protozoa.com/) gave us a virtual tour of the studio, including footage of their work with Sesame Street (as in Elmo interacting with "live furniture" through the motion-capture of foam rubber pieces being manipulated). There was quite a bit of time spent on motion-capture and how Protozoa and DotComix, a sister company, use this procedure. The examples presented seemed to show that if motion-capture -- as is -- may have had its day, it may now have hit a wall of sorts. If animation is art (that could be an open question), then surely it must deal with transposition (you know, "art is what makes us see" or "it is the lie that makes reality more real"). Motion-capture seems to have fallen for the literal, bypassing/avoiding that transposition all together. DotComix especially seems to bring to my mind questions about the differences between entertainment and art; a recurring theme for me during this and other such events. I keep running into a question that could be phrased this way: "Isn't it time to choose between South Park and Rembrandt?" And I don't agree with those who say that we now can have both. I believe we can have "something" when we try to have both, but both "it ain't!" The predominantly French audience seemed to respond favorably to the offerings from DotComix. I however noticed that, for most of them, the deeper content of (for example) Duke 2000 was totally absent. The French can often project a lot of meaning (or miss it all together) in all things "American" (need I say, "Jerry Lewis?"). I asked pointed questions to several members of the audience and very few knew of Doonesbury, or even less of what this comic strip represents in terms of the post-Vietnam War American psyche. Interestingly enough, I see a common thread developing between motion-capture, virtual 3D modeling, 3D animation and the creation of "autonomous virtual humans." They all have to accept, as a given, the a-priori existence of "the world," a world made of solid objects moving in empty space. This is rooted in what Husserlian Phenomenology would call a "naive" world view (not necessarily pejorative), and I believe we already have found many indications that this is far from being a true reflection of our experience of our reality, our "living present." Later on, Ludovic Duchâteau introduced Virtools (http://www.next-url.com/) and demonstrated how Virtools Creation can bring behavioral 3D authoring to people who have little or no programming background. The Virtools Web Player could be an interesting plug-in for viewing 3D animation on the Web, but it is not yet available for the Mac at the time of writing. Mendel3D (http://www.mendel3d.com/) was presented as a new set of tools to create and deliver 3D content on the Web. The file sizes these things can reach are amazingly small, something that I am sure will be of interest to many a Webmaster. On Being Human We also had our first encounter of the day with Maurice Benayoun (http://www.z-a.net and http://www.benayoun.com/) and the creation of virtual worlds in which both "real" humans and virtual humans can interact. Some of his better known works are The Tunnel Under the Atlantic (Montréal and Paris, 1995), World Skin (Ars Electronica, 1998) and Tunnel Paris/New Delhi (Paris and New Delhi, 1998). This set the tone for what the day would be mostly about, a very serious investigation of the interface between the virtual and the "real." The questions that were brought up during the day, and the way in which they were dealt, set a tone that was quite different from the rest of the event. We were no longer looking passively at presentations of a general nature. We were being challenged by ideas that looked at our very notion of what it is to be "human." The work of Stéphane Donikian (and others such as Daniel Thalmann) forces a deep reflection on the nature of our being.

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