Relative State

Virtual Live Recording Artist

OK, here’s something cool for everyone who doesn’t identify with what society says they are based on their physical body. At the Technology Entertainment Design 11 conference in 2001, inventor Ray Kurzweil demonstrated a system which captured his body movements and voice and digitally altered them into the body movements and voice of his female alter-ego Ramona, who became (as Kurzweil says) “the first live virtual recording artist”.

Computer technology has been a real boon for people who either don’t identify with their body or wish to explore alternate identities. To quote Kurzweil’s explanation:

We all have personalities within us that are difficult if not impossible to express with our real-world bodies and in real-world environments.

With the current level of generally available technology this sort of activity is restricted to text and static images. Video and audio tend to be viscerally, immediately convincing in a way that text usually isn’t.

37 comments February 25th, 2006

BSG actress on playing Six

This was just too poignant a quote to pass up. Tricia Helfer, the actress who plays Battlestar Galactica’s character Six, commented about her role at September 2005’s Dragon*Con:

“We kind of got Six into a box somehow and we’ve been trying to figure out how to get out of it inside the limitations of an ensemble show,” she said. “When your character is in someone else’s head all you find yourself doing is reacting to what goes on in their head. You don’t really have an arc, or a story, of your own.”

…though it seems that the second season—especially last night’s surprising episode Downloaded—is starting to change that.

9 comments February 25th, 2006

Greg Egan’s The Extra

Science fiction author Greg Egan’s stories often deal with themes of the nature of consciousness, mind transfers, artificial intelligence, and so forth. He is considered one of the best current hard science fiction writers, and he has won the Hugo Award, one of the two top awards in science fiction.

Egan wrote horror before he wrote science fiction, and it shows. But his stories are far from the usual fare. A typical horror story involving mind transfers or clones or the like might try to scare the reader with lurking clones of the main character, doing strange things out of sight. In The Extra and in many of his other stories, he reverses this convention. The premise is that the higher reasoning centers of a person’s brain are transplanted into another body, but the lower centers retain some consciousness; ordinarily we would see things from the perspective of the higher centers and the horror would come from the not-quite-consciousness of the lower centers in the old body—the horror of ambiguous personhood. But Egan writes from the perspective of the ignored, of the transient, of the minds that exist unacknowledged and powerless—in this case, the lower centers left over from the transplant, and this is far more unsettling than the other way could ever be…

80 comments February 1st, 2006