{"id":4429,"date":"2012-11-02T16:16:45","date_gmt":"2012-11-03T00:16:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=4429"},"modified":"2013-06-18T12:54:32","modified_gmt":"2013-06-18T20:54:32","slug":"magic-mirror-paintings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2012\/11\/02\/magic-mirror-paintings\/","title":{"rendered":"Magic Mirror Paintings"},"content":{"rendered":"

My character Joey Moon says he\u2019s an artist. He wanted his friend Morton Plant to show his work in an art gallery, but Joey wouldn\u2019t tell Morton the gallery-owner what his work looks like. So at this point, I need to decide what Joey\u2019s work does <\/em>look like, so I can be prefiguring it, and so I can set it up for a role in the story of The Big Aha<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m thinking Joeys work should be nurb-related\u2014where nurbs are the wetware tweaked biocomputational \u201cdevices\u201d\u009d that we\u2019ll be using in a hundred years. Simple idea: Joey\u2019s works are squidskin displays that mirror the viewer\u2019s face, but with some processing tweaks added.<\/p>\n

Call it a magic mirror.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

[Here\u2019s a draft of a painting of Joey Moon and Loulou Sabado, characters in \u201cThe Big Aha.\u201d\u009d The painting is called \u201cNight of Telepathy.\u201d\u009d An earlier painting of these two people appears below. Joey doesn\u2019t really look like this, but it\u2019s how he visualizes himself. Actually this might be Joey\u2019s friend Morton Plant, and not Joey himself in the picture. Doing these paintings is helping me a lot with the novel.<\/em>]<\/p>\n

But I need more, something to kick it up a level. Another person\u2019s face can kind of hypnotize you, and you sometimes feel compelled to mimic it. Speaking of fascination, think of the way that you can become enthralled with your own mirror-image, especially if you\u2019re a teenager, or bored, or vain. So the magic mirror\u2019s is showing you your own face slightly tweaked, and you start reacting to the image, and you get into a feedback loop that drives you toward some extreme emotional state.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The extreme state you reach varies according to the viewer\u2019s emotional make-up. The magic mirror simply feels around interactively for the biggest reaction on your part.<\/p>\n

Some viewers fully freak out\u2014raging in anger, weeping hysterically, frantically apologizing, roaring in rage, getting lost in grimaces. Their faces get so distorted that they look like Francis Bacon paintings. And the magic mirror might then freeze on a little blither-loop of that peak intensity image.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Later, if you want, you store that clip into memory and reset the magic mirror and collect another image. Or maybe not\u2014maybe Joey freezes all images of himself or of those around him and those are the finished works he sells. If you can do-it-yourself it has more the feeling of a toy than of an artwork, so you ask as high a price.<\/p>\n

I saw something a little <\/em>like this at the San Jose ZeroOne festival in fall, 2012. You\u2019d lie on your back and right over your face you\u2019d see an interactive video image of your face that was tweaked to show your face decaying like a corpse, and with flies, and with fungi growing on it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Joey doesn\u2019t want to show his magic mirror works to anyone until they go on sale, as the idea could be relatively easy to pirate.<\/p>\n

Re. the software in the magic mirror, we can suppose that Joey has some nurb-hacking abilities. It\u2019s fairly non-technical, in that you don\u2019t use a formal computer language. You just need to learn to nurbs in a certain way\u2014perhaps it\u2019s like how the Unipuskers speak in my novel Frek and the Elixir<\/em>, that is, every sentence is an imperative.<\/p>\n


\n The same two people in a painting called \u201cLouisville Artist,\u201d\u009d oil on canvas, October, 2012, 24\u201d\u009d x 20\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the image.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My character Joey Moon says he\u2019s an artist. He wanted his friend Morton Plant to show his work in an art gallery, but Joey wouldn\u2019t tell Morton the gallery-owner what his work looks like. So at this point, I need to decide what Joey\u2019s work does look like, so I can be prefiguring it, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-the-big-aha"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4429"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4724,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4429\/revisions\/4724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}