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.

51 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.

10 comments February 25th, 2006