Class Three

The Zombie, Robot are interesting possible pose/memes with interesting associations.  There are similarities between the two.  The Zombie is a sentient human descending into a 'robotic' instinctual or programmed existance, one in which he or she is no longer aware or conscious, moving through an unconscious half life of habitual motions (with an urge for living blood and flesh in horror films); a robot is an automaton that is becoming increasingly sophisticated and is often portrayed as ascending into the realm of consciousness.

There is also the issue of 'feelings'; both a zombie and robot might have their capacity for 'feeling' and an emotional life questioned.

Our fascination for both archetypes might be our fascination with the idea of consciousness, of awareness itself.  How conscious are we really?  How much of our day to day behaviour is consciously controlled? It would be easy to presume we are more conscious than we really are.  Are people around us conscious? Are animals conscious?  What animals?  If a machine became sentient and conscious, could we really tell?   If a sentient person became an unconscious automaton following instictual or automatic behaviour and responses, could we really tell?  Are some of us humans more conscious or aware than others?  Great efforts have been made by humans  through discipline or drugs to expand consciousness.

Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band performs on 'Do Not Adjust Your Set' in the late 1960's.

Interestingly, the roots of being a 'hippy' might be in 'being aware'.  Hippy, or 'hip', probably came from 'hep', as in being a 'hep-cat' (hep person). Hep apparently has it's roots in African American culture and indicates 'awareness'.  There are some theories out there, probably a bit flaky, that try to suggest that the dawn of human consciousness was a result of drug taking, that at some point in our past we ate, or, drank elixirs that opened our eyes, so to speak.  Below, a Mesopotamian God with a driinking vessel in hand and well-opened eyes.

Alternatively, in the actual Zombie tradition as practiced in Haiti it is speculated that drugs are used to hypnotise or anesthatize victims into an unconscious and suggestable state in which they can be made to do the bidding of others.  It would appear that drugs are useful to both increase consciousness and reduce it, to liberate robots or create zombies.

Philosophers struggle with the issue of awareness and consciousness by creating philosophical zombies, or p-zombies, for thought experiments in which they might try to identify the aware and the unaware. Artificial intellegence researchers struggle with what it would take to discriminate a sentient machine from a non sentient one.  Medical ethicists struggle to recognise awareness in brain injured or comatose patients.

Back to our unconscious or semi conscious zombies and robots!  There is a huge sub-genre of horror films based on the Zombie, a wealth of poses for study, some of which are archetypal and oft-repeated.  Zombie marches are popular and humerous manifestations of the zombie pose/meme by hundreds of participants.

There are also many manifestations of the robot in film and literature.  It's perhaps harder to pin down archetypal poses because the entities are machines and not necessarily as humanoid as ourselves.  2001: A Space Odyssey's Jupiter mission space craft had a vast powerful on-board computer, HAL, very much like a mainframe computer, but with portals and tentacles throughout the spaceship to monitor and control it's functions. The space craft was 'his' body, and not in the image of 'his' creators. This is a fascinating film for many reasons, partly because the astronauts, throughout the later part of it, are so highly trained in reason and logic that their acting is wooden and they seem to try to behave very much like unemotional robots. The robot HAL seems to try hard to engage them at a human level of conversation, probing them about feelings, and presenting them with hints of emotion. HAL ultimately becomes paranoid about the mysterious mission, and in a very jealous and possibly human manner kills all the astronauts but one.  Near the end of the film we witness a long slow 'death scene' in which the surviving astronaut gradually shuts down HAL's functions, while HAL pleads for his 'life', expressing fear and anxiety about the fate that is to befall him.  We witness his excrutiating termination and loss of sentience as his conversation and language skills become more and more rudimentary.

There are lots of examples of fictional and real robots that are humanoid.  Designers seem to recognise our desire for a face with which to to interact with when confronting an intelligent entity.  An example of a wonderful fictional humanoid robot can be found at the link to the Johnny Walker spot down below.  Despite being an immortal, sentient and durable piece of sophisticated machinary, the robot laments that he will never know what it is like to be or feel human.  The product manufacturers anticipate our agreement with the robot and hope we'll drink...to being human.

The Zombie

Dawn of the Dead Trailer HERE.

The Robot

It's interesting to note how poses cross genres.  One of the robot poses above is very similar to the pose struck by Fascists or Superheros, arms firmly placed on hips.  The robot far right, which is actually operational and was apparently designed in Japan with the idea of replacing fashion models, takes a characterist lurching Zombie-pose.

See the Johnny Walker 'Android' spot HERE.

(This is a different...and I think nicer version of the one we saw in class.  It gives you an idea of how editing in or editing out different scenes, widening the point of view...can make similar footage qualitively different, possibly better.  There is an exellent image of the robot looking at a mirror...an interface...to see the reflection not of himself, but of a human being.)

See the extinguishing of HAL the computer's consciousness HERE.

Poses from Machine Vision and the Machine/Human Interface

While speculating about humans losing consciousness and machines gaining it, an interesting pose for a meme that may well be incubating at the moment is 'machine vision'.  How do machines see us?  How will they see us when, or if, they became sentient.  I don't use the program, but Microsoft Kinect is a program which allows you to communicate with your computer using your hands.  So upheld hands open hands seem to be imaged frequently. This harkens back to the prayer pose; or to poses and gestures in which a being with hands approaches another being with hands that they feel are sentient.  Think of chimps or intellegent primates discovering a mirror.  At first they see their reflection and approach it like another chimp.  Hands are often held against the mirror interface as though glass.  Eventually they discover the reflection is themselves and exhibit self awareness.  But that glass, that mirror, that interface with another percieved entity seems to be imitated in our relationship with an intereactive computer screen, and similar gesturing, as Kinect is calibrated, seem to ocurr.

There is some meaningful or conincidental similarity to this upheld hand gesture to the how the hand is used in some of the other pose/memes we've been looking at.  Early cave drawings were often associated with dozens of stencilled hand images.  Their actual meaning is of course long lost, but they still seem to communicate something to us, in the same way as the images above and the images below.

The way Kinect seems to work is by transmitting infra red beams which can apparently be seen with night vision goggles, if you happent to have the program and the goggles.  The computer might be seeing something like the middle shot.  Who knows though. Below light a grid is projected on a life model to suggest an effect to a classical drawing exercise; a cross contour drawing.  I find machine vision, whether sentient or not, medical imaging, for example, very interesting in respect to the act of drawing.  Our brains are machines of sorts, and image and imagine in ways that might parallel machine imaging.  There is a parallel between what machines do and the human brain does:  Imaging and Imagining.

Below are some 'machine images', remarkable in that they reveal what the human eye can't see but, with proir knowlege, can imagine, in the same way that we can imagine bone structure inside a model's body similarly to how an x-ray might image it. The images below, left to right, are a CAT scan, an airport security x-ray, and thermal imaging.  Looking at machine imaging can be a valuable way to inform drawing style and technique because, although you can in fact draw and render an image similar to the human eye, you can also draw in many other ways that suggest form and naturalism but which are no where near optical reality.  For example, a line drawing, for example a quick gesture.  Such a drawing is just as strange, interesting and as insightful in it's own way and for it's own purposes as a machine image.

Madonna and Child

The Pieta

The archetypal Pieta image somehow eluded me as a pose to consider for this workshop.  However, I suggested that anyone who could think of an archetypal pose that they would like to have the model take should bring an image or idea to class.  One of us responded to that suggestion.  The pose she brought was actually a distinct pose of her own, and she had sketched up a preliminary idea for the arrangement, which involved posing the male model one week, and adding the female model the next.  Althought the pose was original, there were pronounced echoes of archetypal poses in her arrangement.  The most noticable was that of the pieta, however it could also be likened, as can the pieta, to the Madonna or Mother and Child above.  The main difference is that in the Pieta, the male figure is adult.

The fact that the workshop artist's pose bore a resemblance to, or unconsciously refered to, Madonna or Pieta figures, in no way diminishes the power of her own personal variation of the theme.  In fact, I would argue that in refering, unconsciously or unconsciously, to an existing tradition of figure arrangements can only add power to her drawing; and ours.

The Pieta is a religious image.  The Mother of Christ bears her dead Son in a fashion similar to how she bore him as an infant.  How many adult Mothers have lost adult Sons?  The image can expand beyond the religious icon to represent all Mothers who have lost, or sacrificed, their Sons.  Likewise the appeal of The Madona and Child can appeal to all Mother and their infant children, and become not just a religious icon, but a recognisable icon of Motherhood.  Once an archetype is established, visual artists (like our fellow workshop artist), filmmakers, dance choreographers, can respond to that archetype in sometimes jarring deviations from the orthodox iconography.

One related various to the Pieta/Madonna arrangement might be the oft-repeated theme of death and the maiden, or recieving angel of death.  The nurturing or lamenting Madonna might be replaced with a menacing or even consoling death figure. 

Prayer and Supplication

There seem to be many positions for prayer, but the early Christian stature of hands raised and extended is interesting because it seems it was borrowed from thousands of years of appealing to, and surrendering to, the pagan Gods.  It's curious that when people surrender themselves to or appeal for mercy from other people they assume very similar positions to this archetypal position of prayer.

Death and Repose

The Good Shepherd

The Good Shepherd is an archetypal image that predates Christianity by hundreds or  even thousands of years. In earlier versions depicting Ancient Greek or Mespotamian God Figures the sheep might have been replaced by a calf.   Many archetypal pagan image/poses were adopted by early Christian iconographers.  As well, in early Church iconography the actual rendering of the Christ figure might be quite indistinguishable between renderings of Apollo figures.  It took a few hundred years for Christ grow a beard in the majority of depictions.

Class Four