This paper will offer some speculations on the nature of 3D computer imaging and animation. This is a huge topic far beyond the scope of the available space. My ruminations will be, unavoidably, somewhat less than comprehensive. I will analyse two films that have animated my speculations on this subject and also provided my preliminary focus on the figuring of the body in 3D computer imaging work. The films, Tony Thorne’s Serving Suggestion and Justine Cooper’s Rapt provide very different examples of the way in which the body can be conceptualised in this medium.
I offer comments on these films as preliminary meditations drawn from a wider consideration of new media technologies and the ‘essence’ of the digital. By ‘essence’ here I do not mean that there is a substantial and eternal ‘core’ to be found within digital modes of imaging and communication. Rather, I am concerned with pursuing an eminently more ‘animatic’ conception of the essence of the ‘digital revolution’: namely, Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of ‘essence’ (wesen) as the motive force of a continuous and constantly transforming presencing rather than a static and unchanging kernel within diverse phenomena. My analysis of 3D computer animation seeks a path to the digital’s ‘goings on’–as Samuel Weber has translated Heidegger’s reformulation of the notion of essence–that is, what transformations to notions of image, matter and object the digital revolution puts in train.
Let me ennumerate two starting points for these speculations:
1. The question of what is different or peculiar to computer-based digital animations, particularly 3D ones. While describing various forms of non-computer 3D forms such as claymation and pixellation Maureen Furniss notes that "like backgrounds, the characters of 3D animation are affected by the materials used to create them". Of course, for 3D computer animation the backgrounds and characters are affected not by the material but by the immateriality of ‘information’ that is used to create them. Unlike 2D forms of digital animation, 3D poses the question of materiality because it simulates the animation of "objects that have" as Furniss says, "body and form in themselves".
The question of what is peculiar to 3D computer animation revolves around the curious status of the computer generated objects and their possession of "body and form in themselves". The nature of the digital object, its paradoxical immaterial embodiment, is for me a puzzle, one which relates to wider critical concerns in the theorisation of cyber-culture, the cyborg, and post-humanism/post-modernism about the ramifications of the centrality of information and digital ‘communication’ today.
2. This puzzle also leads to my second point of departure, a short 3D work by Aboriginal Australian animator Tony Thorne, Serving Suggestion (1998). This film deals playfully with the difference between 2D and 3D; and this play relates to embodiment and the interior of the body. The film’s gagline is both self consiously puerile and deceptively sophisticated in its speculations about the nature of 3D animation; its fun with mucus and vomit was what got me thinking about 3D digital animation.
Serving Suggestion follows the adventures of a 7 or 8 year old boy, a veritable ‘snot-nosed brat’, on a rampage of illicit consumption in a supermarket having escaped from mother and little brother. The opening shot shows him temporarily preoccupied with licking the mucus dripping from his nose. After creating mayhem for an old lady by scattering pebble like lollies across an aisle, he espies in the distance his holy grail, "Choccy Pops" breakfast cereal. Breaking open the packet, however, angers the monkey figure pictured on the box and apparently living within it. The monkey siezes the brat, drags him into the cereal box and gives him his comeuppance, leaving him worse for wear and a prisoner on the cover. The monkey makes good his escape with the faintly smiling approval of the creatures on all the other cereal packets, leaping from aisle to aisle in the supermarket-cum-jungle. In the final scene the brat’s mother collects the "Choccy Pops" packet distractedly, not noticing her boy’s battered face on the cover. His little brother does notice it, however, and promptly throws up all over it as the shot tracks around to show the film’s credits on the back of the box.
The narrative turns on a struggle for liberation from 2D to 3D existence.
Two dimensional life is represented as a restricted form of existence by the animation of the cereal packet creatures’ eye-movements only. Effectively it is a form of imprisonment on a flat 2D surface (there are echoes here of fables about being captured inside a mirror). Three dimensional life is characterised by a freedom of movement in space through the animation of a substantial bodily existence.
The mucus which figures so prominently in the film’s introduction to its main character leaves the audience in no doubt of the caricatural nature of this story about a little snot-nosed brat. There are strong echoes in Serving Suggestion’s chief protagonist of Toy Story’s (John Lasseter, 1995) caricature of the demonic little (boy) monster, Sid. Both are darker, 90’s updates of the archetypal "Dennis the Menace" figure. The mucus is also operating as an abject marker of bodily interiority. Generated in Alias Wavefront’s "Power Animator" 3D animation software using NURBS surface geometry with surface texture rendering in sickly green, its volume ‘proves’ the existence of the body from which it oozes by displaying the body’s interiority for all to see.
Interiority is what a body properly has. Embodiment can be understood as the state of having or enclosing a material density in volumetric space. To embody can also mean to endow something abstract with a kind of existence, to bring to life something non-living via an "incarnation". The mucus confirms Serving Suggestion’s embodiment of the snot-nosed kid who is more than a ‘two dimensional’ graphic caricature, in the sense in which ‘two dimensional’ connotes unreal, superficial and schematic. His virtual bodily existence makes it difficult to conclude that he is simply a ‘two dimensional’ caricature done in 3D. He exceeds the literal and figurative parameters of ‘two dimensionality’.
The vomit at the conclusion of Serving Suggestion is a reflexive joke that both explores and exacerbates this paradoxical nature of 3D embodiment. It is a literal sign of the superiority of volume over surface. It has a caricatural quality like the mucus discussed above. But it also has a 3D status that is underlined by the simulated camera track past it and around the Choccy pop box at the film’s end. Unlike the other bodies (mum, the baby from which it issues, the ape, the cereal box) the vomit is not a wire-frame diagram made up of polygons and NURBS ‘dressed’ in a surface texture. That is, it is not an empty body covered over by a surface render like the body from which it is apparently expressed. It is animated via the technique known as "particle simulation", where small 3D ‘particles’ are generated and then animated to move in a given manner whose direction and pathway are determined by algorithms and preset departure and arrival points. The texture and colour of the vomitus was created using a type of particle called a "blobby surface" which puts spheres at each particle’s virtual location and blends them together mathematically. The texture is a "solid 3d texture" that exists throughout the virtual space occupied by the particle simulation. This vomit animation is the virtuoso pièce de resistance of three dimensionality in this piece. Its chunky solidity both confirms the embodiment of the little brother (and the reduction to flatness of his bigger brother) and exceeds it, likening it to the (empty) box on which it now sits disgustingly.
The 3D digital body, then, is immaterial, a simulation made out of ‘information’, although this is a problematic statement because nothing can be ‘made’ out of’ information–at least not in the traditional sense of the verb, "to make", which concerns the fashioning of existing materials. The computer itself is nothing other than a simulation machine; that is, through its computations and algorithms and its flexible interface it simulates other machines and machine-dependent processes from a typewriter to a photographic lab and an animator’s studio. It duplicates their processes and imitates their implements and interfaces.
But it is problematic to assume that simulation via information because it is literally immaterial is "immaterial" today in the sense of irrelevant, marginal or extraneous. Quite the opposite is the case. Characterisations of the "information age" and postmodernity routinely depart from the perspective that the "dematerialisation" of production, consumption, communication and representation are defining characteristics of the contemporary era. The acquisition, exchange and dissemination of information is thought to be more profitable in advanced Western economies today than the manufacture and distribution of material goods, a situation which is reflected in the ongoing inflation of mass mediated electronic visual culture and communication. An intriguing critical version of this ‘information age’ discourse is found in N. Katherine Hayles’ "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers". Her hypothesis is that the opposition ‘presence versus absence’ is becoming less and less important in the digital age in comparison with the opposition of ‘pattern and randomness’. This latter is the key opposition of cybernetic theory. Pattern versus randomness defines the key problematic of the communicability of messages and the complexity of information systems. In the computer age communicability and complexity are, argues Hayles (along with many others), more significant than the actual physical presence of objects, persons, or communities. This proposition, I believe, can frame my attempt to develop further speculations on the nature of the digitally produced, animated 3D body. Justine Cooper’s film, Rapt, is central to this project of considering the body’s physical and cybernetic modes of existence and will be examined shortly.
By way of clarification of the significance of the terms ‘pattern’ and ‘randomness’ as they are used in cybernetics, let us first return to Serving Suggestion for a moment. Baby and vomit are of further interest in this context. Together they figure the central relationship of pattern and randomness in informational communication systems. The vomit’s disgustingness has to do with its indeterminate status as neither object nor subject. It is formless that is, without definite outline and identity. According to information theorists, communication (the raison d’etre of any cybernetic system) depends on randomness to avoid redundancy and mere replication of pattern, while pattern makes feedback and message communicable and coherent. As Hayles puts it, pattern is recognisable through repetition: "If there is only repetition, however, no new information is imparted; the intermixture of randomness rescues pattern from sterility. If there is only randomness, the result is gibberish rather than communication". The baby-vomit pairing illustrate the interreationship between the opposed terms of pattern and randomness. Form is ‘clarified’ in and through the expulsion of the unformed, and the unformed is in turn ‘reabsorbed’ as a random ‘malfunction’ of the baby-system.
I would like to turn now to another 3D computer work, one which, again, is more a source of these meditations than an illustration of them. Australian based artist, Justine Cooper’s work, Rapt (1998) uses 3D volumetric images produced from MRI scans of the artist’s body to animate what Robyn Donohue calls (alluding to the 1966 Hollywood film of the same name) a "fantastic voyage" inside the informational, immaterial body.
Rapt uses a quite different imaging technique from the standard commercial 3D animation packages. It executes a creative appropriation of medical imaging techniques, themselves derived from US military developments in 3D representation. The program ‘Voxel View’ builds a volume out of the 2D scans. The artist then designed an applet to animate the 3D images by varying the interpolation between the images.
In Rapt interiority is imaged via the program’s calculus of extrapolation of data from 2D images to build 3D images and then by interpolation between the static 3D image units. The body is not a hollow void that is covered over. It is a mysterious, immaterial zone that evokes the marvellous or the poetic. The initial shot tracks forward through ethereal, wispy clouds in an abstract, grey-scaled milieu. Later, we see a representation of the the full ‘data set’ of 2D images stacked up in a row or column. This is the base information from which the transparent 3D body is re-composed as a virtual double of the scanned body of the artist. The body is then seen appearing and then disappearing from different angles and in different directions (toes to scalp, top to bottom). The soundtrack is a mix of ‘technological’ sounds inspired by Cooper’s experience during the medical scanning procedure inside the MRI machine, and effects that evoke viscous and liquid states of interiority.
As the film proceeds the body transcends its indeterminate beginnings to become a particular body with a particular face, a face that comes into resolution as an assembled sedimentation of horizontal sections of virtual head at the conventional filmic scale of the close up. This shot of the face begs the question of identity and individuality rather than simply answering it. It is monochrome, fractured and schematic–unlike a conventional photograph or portrait it does not speak of unique appearance or personality but of construction, digital compression and extrapolation.
As with the ‘travelling shots’ that create and uncreate the body from top to toe, the face in Rapt makes us consider the nature of information in cybernetic theory. Unlike the common understanding of the term ‘information’, the concept of information in cybernetic theory as it was first propounded in the 1940s does not refer to a particular ‘content’ of facts or data, that is, with the ‘body’ of a message (in this case, the body of the animator as the signified of the digital signifiers). Rather, in the classical cybernetic theory of Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon information is a quantity expressed in mathematical terms that measures the probability or improbability of a given message being sent in a communication system. In a cybernetically conceived communication system–say, for example, a simple system like an oil heater’s thermostat where two nodes are in communication with each other, the thermometer and the heater switch–there will be a finite range of possible messages being sent and received by each node. In our example the ‘messages’ will be in the form of electronic signals from the thermometer to the heater switch activiting it or deactivating it when necessary, and in the form of heat energy from the heater which the thermometer measures in the atmosphere. The sending of a particular message from among a range of possible messages eliminates the uncertainty about what message will be sent. The thermometer records a temperature below that set on the thermostat. This eliminates the uncertainty about what message will be received about the temperature in the room. The thermostat responds by communicating a signal to the heater to switch on. To this extent the temperature reading bears a unit of information about the overall situation that is actualised by the receipt of that particular message.
The situation that the cybernetic system is controlling via its communication system (in this case the ambient temperature in the room) is defined in this way with respect to the range of possible messages that could have been sent and received at that point. This information unit is different from but related to the ‘meaning’ of the message. It relates the specific message to the communications system of which it is a functioning part. This system is described in abstract, schematic terms using mathematical language to define the quantity and parameters of information exchange and feedback. That information can characterise, control, structure and systematise completely different existential phenomena (in our case, heat energy and electronic signals) is to a significant extent the key to cybernetics. Everything can be understood and made functional as an information system.
It is this logic of information that enables Norbert Weiner to say that the organism is a pattern that through its repetitions and redundant elements resists change, chaos and uncertainty. Wiener claims that "the biological individuality of an organism seems to lie in a certain continuity of process and in the memory by the organism of the effects of its past development". The greater the pattern governing this process, the greater the complexity of its relations and hence of the uncertainty it must deal with in order to maintain the organism’s ‘homeostasis’. That is, the greater the amount and complexity of the information inherent in its system of communcation and control.
This is the phenomenology, or moreover the ontology, of the body which Rapt both presents and holds up for critical scrutiny. The body manifests in Cooper’s 3D autoportrait as a marvellous, intricate pattern whose sophisticated dance with randomness and particularity is its enduring, quasi-mystical, digital essence. It recalls Wiener’s claim that we "are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves". Continuing on in this pre-Socratic vein, Wiener says "the individuality of the body is that of a flame rather than that of a stone, of a form rather than that of a bit of substance". Cooper’s fantastic voyage within appears to reinforce this cybernetic ontology of the being of human being.
The body as matter, as embodiment in space and time, is inessential in this perspective. This is why pattern is more significant than presence in the cybernetic world picture. But the face of the virtual body in Rapt marks as keenly, if not moreso, the absent body of the animator as it does the sophistication of her cybernetic pattern. The digital translation of that body into a set of data that eliminates a complex series of uncertainties related to the possible patternings of the human form is ghosted, one is tempted to say, by the absent ‘real’ body of the filmmaker.
As Roslyn Diprose and Catherine Vasseleu have pointed out, with reference to Jacques Derrida’s notion of "spacing", in their essay, "Animation –Aids in Science Fiction," it is the gaps between frames that enable an animation to live and to move. I would propose, in conclusion to my tentative and preliminary speculations here, the following paradoxical assertion, one which requires no doubt a fuller and more rigorous exploration: that it is the void inside the 3D computer animated body, such as those bodies seen in Serving Suggestion, that gives it a substantial existence. In a similar paradoxical fashion it is the spaces between (and within) the slices of data which allow Justine Cooper’s virtual body to come to life in the digital sphere. These gaps, these absences are intimately related to information’s cybernetic ‘essence’ as uncertainty and improbability. They provide a ‘negative visualisation’ as it were of the negated possibilities in any communication which are constitutive of the cybernetic value that information represents. This ‘negative visualisation’ also conjures for me a shadow-gram of the pure operativity of cybernetics, that is, its potential to translate anything into a working model of communication, regulation and control. This digital void is a pure, cybernetic potential.
These ‘spacings’ are crucial to 3D computer animation’s actualisation of a virtual three dimensionality in which objects have "body and form in themselves", that is, a virtual spatiality that exceeds the pictorial, caricatural and insubstantial space of the two dimensional picture plane. At the same time these gaps remind us that this substantial existence is contingent upon animation’s capacity to mask the void in creating the illusion of life in depth. In doing so–and here I follow on from Diprose and Vasseleu’s allusion to Derrida’s thought on the interrelationship of presence and absence–they also bear a trace of the material bodies on which they are modelled and for which they are engendered. This trace passes through the presence/absence polarity that never ceases to return home uncannily in the digital age of the pattern and its other.
ILLUSTRATIONS DETAILS
FIGURE 1: Still from Serving Suggestion (d. Tony Thorne, 1998): Opening shot of the ‘snot-nosed brat’.
FIGURE 2: Still from Rapt (d. Justine Cooper, 1998): The artist’s body animated via the volume visualisation program, "Voxel View".
FIGURE 3: Still from Rapt (d. Justine Cooper, 1998): Close up of the artist’s virtual face.
REFERENCES
Cholodenko, Alan (ed.) The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation (Sydney: Power Publications, 1991)
Donohue, Robyn "Justine Cooper: Rapt", Photofile 56, May 99, p. 38-40.
Druckrey, Timothy (ed.) Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation (New York: Aperture, 1996)
Furniss, Maureen Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics (Sydney: John Libbey & Co, 1998)
Heidegger, Martin The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977)
Weber, Samuel Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media, ed. Alan Cholodenko (Sydney: Power Publications, 1996)
Wiener, Norbert Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1961).
Wiener, Norbert The Human Use of Human Beings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954)
Patrick Crogan teaches screen studies at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. His research interests span animation, film, new media and critical theories of technology. Recent publications include an essay on French theorist Paul Virilio for Theory, Culture and Society and a paper on flight simulation for The Life of Illusion (forthcoming).