SINA's NOTES + LINKS http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.rigging ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// TAKING THE RIG AND RUN let's talk about "CG": computer games, computer graphics, categorical grammar, conceptual graphs, computational gesture, computational geometry, complete governance, canter of gravity, common ground, commanding general... etc etc etc <3 comes from an industry which is a non-feminist blackbox notion of interface and how things are multiply folded upon each other problemitising the notion of 'opening up' as a way to understand the relation to what is inside the blackbox == anthropocentric desire --> membrane (how the membrane is designed to communicate with the world) -> the possibility of life on earth started in the moment in which organisms started getting together aproject on the amazon forest networks of rigid bodies vs nodes in space (skeleton vs mesh) rigging and skinning go together at the industrial empire, "speculating on the inorganic skeletal animacies" "the innocent programmer" (is there such a thing?) Belief in the "essential ambiguity of technology" including John Ihde -> technology is essentially ambiguos-> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Ihde how does the hacker feel when making the rig what is considered as a character, what is considered an animation when itis printed, virtual... animated rigging character animation as a choreography key if you're dealing with a subjectivity issues: what we call a character that is "moving" in "world" mesh as a rythm between two environments goal of rigging is to reduce complexity we need to problematize movement --> issues with space, time and matter deciding what is an arm and what is a leg. "rigged" rigging is an interface, something for the animator to use so that they don't have to deal with the mesh rigging is something in movement like a "sentence" in language. Like syntax. words are sticking together. syntax Not based on meaning, but "a peculiar technology that puts things together" "when i move a word, the whole universe moves" the orderof existance in many ancient cultures is a one-dimensional sequence the whole notion of tradition is based on a one-dimensional consequence. A tradition looks in onedirection, and not others. rigs are not just a techno-capitalist invention, but (we can talk about it later) the hint is about the notion of memory How an element is allowed to stretch the notion of flexibility. Stiffness tension between the knots in a rigg; how stiff it is. degrees of flexibility related to tone messy relationships where tensions between mesh and rigg appear -- questions on the ontology. change the rig and you change the way time and space are arranged. ontological commitment hacker point of view wasa shift: from perceptual work with a certain relationship to the software, to the attention to the rig proposesa very specific approach: language --> ontological commintment embedded in language challenge between the programmers and the technical director that needs to come up with a physical and mathematical model rigging an octopus is the ultimate programmers challenge. how organize movement without joints? as a continue wave? if we change the rigg, does the meaning change as well? arrange space-time and the matter of the text (what are other ways to do that?) interest in materiality: material and technologies relations. what are the material objects, that this language commits the CG-hacker to? another possible definition: rigs are clever technological provisional constrictions --> it brings you through water, time, fire, etc provisional technological constructions, that sets up for a specific naturlaisation they always set up for specific naturalisation. It is a commintment to specific naturalisation. mother-tongue arrangements are "natural" toa set of speakers, but they areactual arrangements that were naturalised. certain milieus of techno-imaginations. E.g.: transformers. In transformers inagination, riggs transform in whatever pieces. Riggs are whatever that monitors and condition. It is a way of thinking. it is at stake because it brings the question of how do we feel about that stake. video1: transformers rigging https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDrAzeNS2pk video2: ICE rain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqFUnFPcuwg whatever provisional constellation has a certain kind of transformation is spaceand time. rig is also present in node-based programming - the 'rain' uses a rig that doesnt fit with the familair 'kinetic' idea of the rig. so it is not something 'within' a continuous mesh (or collection of meshes) that drive deformations, but may sit 'outside' the geometry to control behaviour (e.g. in the case of the rain the rig determines the 'degrees of freedom' of the environment). a particle system is 'rigged'... [... the transformation not only through/for its 'mirrored' movement, but 'moved'/restrained by the rig itself ?] let's not get hooked up into the kinetic notion of rigging (which is a very traditional one) vocab.: "inverse kinematics"-> use the kinematics to determine a desired position ¿? "In robotics, inverse kinematics makes use of the kinematics equations to determine the joint parameters that provide a desired position for each of the robot's end-effectors. Specification of the movement of a robot so that its end-effectors achieve the desired tasks is known as motion planning." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_kinematics 'motion planning'!;) from framework to rig rigging brings to a material intensification of the history of the syntax "transformational particularities" in space-tiem matter that transform from one notion to the other /// it is an ontological issue! technology doesn't come up in a human world, but as an organic entity that finds itself in a time-space (this was learnt from Haraway) "you have no idea on how much talent is wasted in CG" --> check youtube I3D symposium videos -> e.g.: paper "Global Stiffness Structural Optimization" <--- that's what the stiff has to deal with realism, speed, efficientcy "Global Stiffness xxx" whenever you come with a concept in your practice, you're working with a rig committing to a metaphor for him, changing the word "framework" with "rigging" was actualy a rig rigs are definitional structures. They are conditions. they are conditions interpetation of Haraway's history of history and mind before and after are necessary conditions for "trans"? [the opposite to trans is cis and it is related with fixedness and stability to what was assigned, not so much to origin] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisgender there is nothing before the rig plants and mirrors are rigged -> whatever element'smotion has a meaning and a role in the narrative Max -> interest in the use of the rig asontology for everyting: how would the technical materiality relate to this? it hasto be down in somewhere: is this narrowing the notion of the rig? material and immaterial understandings of the rig rig - trick - ruse - navigation almost magical DE: kniff "how did you do that ??!" serres - latour Latour in modes of existence: detour: a being facing discontinuity is when a technological being is brought into existence tech and the machine (detour as a mode of freedom from "the machine" - not thinking in terms of machine use when using tech) behavorial anatomical ways of making continuities. It is an invention that is continuous. Perception as a ruge. nothingto do with "i sit down, i think, and i invent" the affordances etc: thewhole notion of perception is the rouse/detour: that entity that came out from the dark / it is about the rhetorics of technical ---coffee break------------