Silicon World

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Attractive isn’t she, It’s a shame she’s not real. What you see above is the result of about 10 hours of work in Photoshop. The whole piece is a composite or collage if you will. The face alone is made of 7 different pieces.

We are living in a world where it’s becoming harder and harder to tell the difference between what’s real and imaginary. As Eiffel 65 put it, we're living in a Silicon World. While their song might not have been about digital falsehoods, I like the mental image and I think the analogy applies. The chorus says “I want a girl with silicon lips and silicon hair” and now, every day when you look at print ads, whether that be magazines, billboards, or banners, it’s all silicon. Nothing makes it to print without first being digitally touched up, or re-mastered.

We are being presented with a false ideal of what beauty is. Don’t believe me? Go watch the Dove, Evolution add. Don’t worry we’ll wait while you do. That and more, goes into what you see every day.

But it’s not just our advertising, it’s our entertainment too. I will assume most people have seen Avatar. I spend a good majority of my time dealing with this kind of thing and even I had to stop at times, during the movie and remind myself that what I was looking at was 100% fake, created from someone’s imagination. We herald it as innovative and groundbreaking when it’s in our entertainment but for the most part, we don’t notice when it’s in our every day life.

Personally I like the fact that technology is catching up to our imaginations. It is now possible, with enough money, to make just about anything come to life on the silver screen and the kid/ artist inside me, loves it.

Up until recently we were limited in our representations of human beings. We just couldn’t make them look real enough. I know that sounds kind of silly but here’s the thing. The closer something resembles a human the more we identify with it. This is called personification. The problem is, at a certain point it looks enough like a human that the brain starts to try and identify it, as an actual person and that’s where we hit the sticking point. If it’s real enough but not perfect, the attraction becomes revulsion, as it ends up looking like a zombie, or a distorted monster. It looks human but something isn’t quite right. You get this nagging feeling in the back of your mind that something is off. Sometimes you can’t quite put your finger on it, but you know something is wrong. That’s your brain telling you it’s not real. Your subconscious looks at reality everyday, and then when it encounters something that’s off, it bugs you. This is called the Uncanny Veil. It’s the reason that for a long time computer animation steered clear of attempting realistic representations of humans. Because we couldn’t cross the veil and so as a result companies like Pixar created stylized version of humans. But now with avatar and other recent films like Benjamin button we have been able to push through and create false realities that are good enough to trick the mind, at least for a little while.

Now there is talk of resurrecting dead actors to make new movies. Bringing back Bruce Lee to make more martial arts films, but now the actor is digital and can do all their own stunts, work any hours you want, and do just about anything you want them to. All you have to do is hire a voice impersonator to do their lines and you’re good to go. Personally I think we’re still a ways off from this technology, but think about what that will do to Hollywood. As much as I love technology, I personally think we will never fully replace real actors. Actors who spend their whole lives learning to most minute control of their emotions and muscles to be able to evoke anything they need on film. I just don’t think we’re going to reach that level of control, at least not in our lifetime.

But where does it stop? With the advancement of technology progressing at the rate it is. Will we soon be seeing videogames that look like movies? We are already close. But will we see the return of Virtual Reality and actually live the games? What will that do to us? If people spend more time playing games then going outside where will the line between self and avatar begin and end? If we can create a digital person who looks real, what’s to stop advertising companies from using computer models instead of real ones? No longer would they have to worry about aging or weight gain.

Are we as a world culture going to continue to accept the advancement of technology or will there be a point where we say no, and draw a line at the level of involvement we allow technology to have in our lives.

Already we have begun to see a back lash against the digital altering of images for advertisements. Will we have a “Bra Burning” of the 21st century, where we reject the standards that media is trying to sell us, the ultra thin, ultra low-rise jeans? Or will we go blindly on into one of Hollywood’s cyberpunk futures, like Surrogates, where we live our lives vicariously through technology, never leaving our homes?

Already we live lives connected to the global community, via the internet, through the umbilical’s of our computers and cell phones. We pour our lives into ones and zeroes, into face book and myspace. People have been known to lose friends, jobs, even marriages to games like World of Warcraft.

Truly we live in a silicon world, but where does it end?