Hello there, well -- I just want to convey my appreciation for a few of the direct responses to bits and pieces of my posts. Thanks Christy for your expansion in response to a request for more elaboration on the concept of 'content' -- now I have a position from which to better understand and appreciate your original posting. Peter, your last paragraph (and further elaborations by Armando), commenting on how we differently perceive sound/ sight -- forms the core of a productive dialectical point and reminds one not to be too lazy with analogies, amongst other things. ...... Andy refers to Ken Perlin's Responsive Face -- and I have heard Ken speak very lovingly about this face and exactly how much stillness (instruction based) is necessary to appear to be living. So definitely check out the URL Andy sent... And Richard -- I'm digesting your response // the 'still' movie you made is great (I wonder if others had a chance to look) and clearly illustrates your points. But I really appreciate your comments on the construction of robots... very good -- I hadn't thought of that. You asked about contexts for synthesized stillness -- it's not so much about the application of the synthesis but an interest of mine in the process of discovering how to do this. For example your sentence "Stillness can be synthesized from learning about the body motion" -- to which I say "precisely" and the question that comes up for me are what understandings or knowledge of 'body motion' might we be looking at to do this and why would certain forms of that knowledge be useful in producing synthesis and other forms not. This is the 'dance-tech' maillist -- and probably many of those on this list would say that a dancer has a certain very high level of knowledge about human motion, very sophisticated. However, generally, investigate how to synthesize stillness -- a computer scientist is not going to consult a dancer... I find this really intriguing. We have this dance knowledge, and then we have the field of human figure animation (of which motion capture is a part) that has evolved from a different collective participation in the forming of a certain type of knowledge about motion. There are aspects, for example, of this knowledge of motion, that can be traced back, in the way that much of computer science can be, to the mathematics work of previous centuries such as that of Isaac Newton and Leonhard Euler at the turn of the 18th C. on gravitation, etc. -- because in the computer to simulate (or synthesize) human motion you have to create the environmental conditions within which this motion takes place, ergo physics. (If you are interested to know where I get some of this -- there are lots of sources online like this 1996 paper by the Thalmanns' http://miralabwww.unige.ch/ARTICLES/HBCS96.html) So, anyway, I'm a bit obsessed by where the dancer's or choreographer's understanding of motion that might sit in relationship to that of the computer scientist/ engineer working on problems of synthesizing/ sampling of motion -- or stillness. ... and blah... best scott
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