Taking the left turn at Uncanny Valley

This weekend, I went with some friends to see Beowulf in IMAX 3-D. It was a very satisfying visual experience, but there was quite a bit of talk afterward about the failure of the computer-generated graphics to appear completely lifelike.

There was quite a bit of talk on this subject in the press, as well. The same conversation seems to happen every time someone makes a CGI movie that aspires to photorealism rather than falling back on the graphical tropes of the cartoon—the 2001 Final Fantasy movie got the same treatment.

It’s dangerous territory. Between depictions of life that we accept because we find them clearly artificial, and therefore harmless, and those that we accept because they fool us into thinking they are real, lie those depictions which we reject because they seem real, but somehow off. Robotics researchers use the term “uncanny valley” to describe this hypothetical space, whose occupants inspire in us a sense of mild to extreme revulsion.

We haven’t been able to cross the uncanny valley yet, with either our robots or our computer graphics. There will be a lot to think about when we succeed—science fictions authors have been preparing us since the mid-twentieth century. But I’m more interested, at least for the moment, about the prospects for computer-generated art once crossing the valley ceases to be an interesting challenge.

Consider, in broad strokes, the development of painting. The pursuit of realism occupied painters during the Renaissance. But once the techniques for realistic depiction had been developed and became widespread, realist painting ceased to be a fine art and became a craft—or the favored style of conservative and anti-intellectual regimes. The arrival of the camera freed painting from the requirements of a practical art, and modern painting became abstract or non-representational, a fitting vehicle for theory.

I think that the recent explosion of visually innovative video games is a good sign that a similar maturation of computer graphics is just around the corner.