Where reality ends and capture begins
“Data capture” is becoming ever more central to media making, whether it is performance capture for acting and animation, screen capture for machinima and animated gifs, 3D scans of physical objects to make virtual models for games or virtual art, or recording and reusing sound. Machine learning is intelligence capture. Algorithms process big data to capture users’ preferences and habits, and predict future outcomes. More than remixing, the concept of capture highlights the acquisition of image, sound, movement, practices, and choices. Capture calls into question the very foundations of truth, trust, history, and journalism.
Capture provides the data that enables prediction of what could happen next. Places, people, and things are captured into simulated environments, avatars and characters that populate them, and the objects with which they interact. Capture transforms what exists materially and what is created digitally, looping between abstract and concrete, 2D and 3D, photorealistic and iconic, creation and destruction, actual and virtual. As we watch, listen, play, and create in captured experiences, how are new realities and new ways of being created? What is captured? By whom? What can be released? What can evade? Or escape? Can we capture reality without being captured?
I’ve been working on Captured since my sabbatical project on Animation and Automation in 2015–2016. I presented on it at HubWeek in Boston at the VR/AR/MR session we hosted at Berklee organized by Divyanshu Varshney. I know the project encompasses the topics of avatars, performance capture, machine learning/artificial intelligence, robotics, non-player characters, volumetric capture, virtual world platforms for teaching, learning, entertainment, gaming, social interactions, and more. What’s being captured is the sum total of all that will come from the ecosystems being built for the convergence of cinema, multiplayer games, installations, happenings, music, live performance, intermedia, interactive fiction, Dungeons and Dragons, social media and its big data, social networks, and more and more . . .
It’s the map in Jorge Luis Borges’s paragraph-long story “On Exactitude in Science,” but it is not in the form of a map. I am still struggling with what form the project should take. Is it written? I do have a book proposal for it. Or do I sketch it, or talk it with motion-captured wild gestures? Oh, yes, as an avatar! Or, is it, as I suspect, an entire virtual environment? Even better: a class with students who are experimenting with the emerging technologies that we can use for capture, and we explore the topic together in projects that combine creative and critical aspects. Well, how the hell do I do that? (I actually have a lot of ideas for how to do that.)
I do know what’s being captured has to do with virtual subjectivity, which starts with the experience of being in a body. In two-dimensional screen-based experiences in which you’re represented by an avatar, whether first-person or third-person (when you see your avatar), you have to imagine being in the environment. Experienced with a headset in a 360-degree environment in which you are in the middle, you are in the first person. You can look down and see an avatar body, or look in a mirror (and studies at Jeremy Bailenson’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford suggest that seeing your avatar in a mirror can be part of an effective experience as an avatar).
It’s what the 1999 movie The Matrix called “residual self image” that matters here, what you think you look like in your head. I don’t believe that people always (or ever) have an “objective” residual self image, but that it is subjective, filtered and shaped by the experience of embodiment. Virtual experiences can use the differences between the person’s residual self image, their imagined virtual self image, and whatever they see when and if they see their avatar in interesting ways. Interactive and immersive art has enormous potential for playing with the multiple variations of material and virtual bodies and subjectivities we can experience. (I wrote about this in an essay about virtual art.)
What’s represented by an avatar is more than self image, or the body in the imaginary, though. One day, I heard my name called. As one does, I turned my head, looking behind me because that’s where the voice came from. Of course, why am I bothering to tell you this story? Because I was standing alone in my studio office, wearing an Oculus Rift headset, and the voice was from a person 3000 miles away. I turned my head, and at the same time, my avatar in High Fidelity turned my head, and there was Tom Schofield, whom I had met when I was in San Francisco a couple weeks prior. He recognized my avatar and came over to say hi.
At that moment when I turned my head in a virtual world to see who was calling my name, I truly embodied my avatar. I turned my head, I turned my avatar head, or my avatar head turned me. The actuality of what I was doing socially matched what I saw and (more importantly, but that is a topic for another time) heard.
I’ve been using avatars to make movies and art in virtual worlds for over ten years, but I never felt fused with the avatar viscerally until that moment. What I experienced what can best be described with the term “interpellation” that French philosopher Louis Althusser used for the process of hailing by which a person is made into a subject. Althusser gave the example of a person turning around when a police officer calls out, Hey you! and “by this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject”.
Depending on the race, gender, age, and place that body is in, that turn has very different implications; when I was teaching the concept of interpellation days after unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, Althusser’s idea took on new relevancies.
What does it mean to carry over the process of becoming a subject into virtual platforms? Will the obsession with capture reinscribe biases? (Yes. And machine vision already has problems with “seeing” black and brown skin tones equally well or valued as white ones.)
Until yesterday when I saw the Codec Avatar project video from Facebook Reality Labs that showed an avatar that was indistinguishable from the person it represented, I did not think that capture would come so fast. Of course, Facebook isn’t rolling out those avatars next week. For some time, we will have our cartoony representations that can hit the sweet spot between abstract and pictorial that Scott McCloud drew about in Understanding Comics.
The journey to the left from simple to complex, iconic to realistic, subjective to objective, universal to specific requires advances in several fields beyond avatar capture. A couple of seconds of the codec avatar data takes up over 500 gigabytes. But the real-time photorealistic capture is coming, and so it’s time for me to get cracking on Captured, in whatever form it may take. A lot is gained by chasing the real, and the real can be augmented creatively and critically. But something is lost, as well. The capture is not the territory. What does it mean to capture, to be captured? And how do we get a new answer to the old question: Who decides who is doing which? Who will capture the capturers?
Where reality ends and capture begins
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