The following set of notes form a lecture that concludes a series of talks held at the Ruskin school of art, the theme was 'Artificial Others'.
The following set of notes remain the intellectual property of Prof. Brian Catling, Oxford University.
LECTURE NOTES
AW means Arthur Worsley
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SILENT FILM OF AW ONLY
There is something familiar about this face. Something seen before or understood about what kind of man he is,
we know him. He is a little like Stan laurel, or Stan laurel mixed with Christopher Walken. A kind of detachment, an uncertaincy of posture An expression 0f seductive vacancy that quivers between the innocent and the sinister.
Both actors project a sense of mimicking humanity. Or rehearsing it.
When children are asked to tell me something about this man from this clip, it is simple. He is shy, He has done something wrong, He is sad, he is about to cry, or He wants to go home.
FILM OF AW IN 2 ACTS
ARTHUR WORSLEY was born in 1920 at Failworth near Manchester. He started to practice his lip control at the age of 8 and had his theatrical debut at the age of 14. When he died at the age of 80, three years ago the press said; " In his heyday he was described as the greatest ventriloquist in the world, and that because he remained mute, through out his act, he had reversed the rolls of ventriloquist and dummy. They were right about the first thing but entirely wrong about the second. He did not reverse the identity in the standard act between a vent and his dummy; he reinvented it and slid an unnerving question under the tradition. He turned the tables on a table turning profession.
The extraordinary need we have to communicate incessantly means that the automata and the ventriloquist only have to come half the way to engage with the spectator. We are already anxious to make the meeting and have started the belief structure turning before they arrive.
Most of us talk to animals, admit it or not. Which is seen as a saner act than talking to ourselves, (at least before the invasion of the mobile phone, which brilliantly disguises self affirmation in the sensible costume of communication) When confronted by a talking bird with a limited but cogent vocabulary, most of our defences and common sense are brushed away. We engage in the belief of coherence, triggered by simple disconnected word sounds. We talk to the bird. If the response is not forthcoming we fall into repetition. Even if you place a sign on a birds cage saying that it talks, it will engender speech from passers by, especially if they believe they are not seen. The tone and pitch of the animals' mimicry can be very accurate and produce even more remarkable Reponses. There was a Mina bird in London Zoo that had learnt a few basic and enquiring word sounds From its previous wealthy owner. Such has; hello, how are you, etc.
It was noted that that some of the Zoo's visitors would not engage with the bird, but became irritated, annoyed and defensive. When ask, one lady embarrassingly said "she could not talk to the bird because it was too posh" This is very English, Apart from highlighting the tragedy of the class system. It also demonstrates the power of the word, the woman's belief (and she was not alone) insists on the authority and the velocity of language even if spoken by a creature or a machine to which it is meaningless.
The ventrilliquill(sic) voice is mostly set at a higher pitch because it is easier to construct speech in the head and throat in the upper registrar. The base tones normally coming from the diaphragm and thorax. This naturally suggested the voice of children; the sound of the small, With all the attendant attitudes; innocents, impertinace, nerve, misunderstanding, rudeness and naivety. In fact all the juicy behavioural highlights that polite adults have learnt not to use. Therefore it is not suprising that once the vent act set around the convention of a the operator and their single dummy, that most were young, insolent or charming, coquettish or vain. Their stage conversations were banter driven, a stand up double act. Often saturated in conflict and sentiment. Some were much, much more.
The art of ventriloquism is divided into two areas of operation, that define both the competence and meaning of the individual act.
The first is lipskill . This is the ability to not move the mouth or other facial muscles while producing the ventriloquial voice.
The second is the ability to give the dummy a life and personality that makes it believable and focuses the audiences attention away from the vocal deceit.
To create a successful act it is not necessary to have both elements in equal measure. One of the most successful British ventriloquist was Peter Brough, who had very poor lip control, but created a very successful career around his charismatic relationship with his doll, the enduring and seductive Archie Andrews. They had his own weekly radio show, that was enormously popular. Andrews was the first radio personalities to develop a wide range of merchandising, including books, dolls, soap and toothbrushes. Television removed the magic. Cunningly lit Music Hall stages and invisible sound studios could hide Brough's lack of technique, but it was horribly exposed by the new and demanding media. He tried many different ways to conceal his problem; he fluttered his hands over mouth. He adopted a series of large false moustaches that dropped over his lips, etc. but no disguise could cover up his trembling mouth from the bright TV studios and the point blank hunger of their cameras. Archie Andrews had always addressed his operator as if he were a servant or old retainer. Brough do this, Brough do that, a gentle elegant mocking that could have fitted into the TV act, if only his voice had come from elsewhere. The visibility of Brough slighting himself was too much for the audience and the humour drained away. Auto-humiliation never appears in Worsleys act, even though the taunts are greater. This is because the position of the audience has been fundamentally changed.
Others simply refused to let the inadequacy of their operator stops their careers. Charlie Mc Carthy took his mouth-moving operator Edgar Bergen to international stardom through 15 Hollywood films and countless hours of television and radio without the slightest doubt who was doing the talking. What happened in Brough1s case was disclosure; it showed his uncertain presence against the confident dummy, with only one voice to share.
Television more than any other medium can smell the victim, the scent of doubt is amplified, its discomfort shared with the audience. This is not removing disbelief, but adding belief of exposure, outside of the acts tight frame of reference. It is equivalent to forgetting the key to wind the automata after showing the wonders of its internal mechanism. When a machine copies or attempts human movement, thought or life, its artificiality often helps add to the wonder of its conceit. There is nothing wrong in being shown the cogs, wheels, springs and levers inside a machine. They do not remove the illusion that helps to create it. The very act of reavelment intensifies the phenomena. A similar process is used by the stage conjuror, who will display the emptiness of his props before filling them with the impossible. The cleverness of machines still holds our attention. In this lecture I am examining only the physical body of machines, the figuration of their movement from the pre to the post industrial. I shall not discuss electronics, computers or machine intelligence at this time. And to balance this I will also avoid puppets, with one major exception. There is no doubt that all machine design is a reflection of human anatomy. Isolated and beautiful in its insistence. Ingenious in its cause and sincere in its effect. When the machine mimics us directly our pleasures double by its precise intensity and our unattainable perfection.
The fascination for artificial others, seems to cross most cultural and national boundaries. Our focus on intriguing models of ourselves is a constant. The more complex these devices are the greater the allure and our subconscious speculation on their identity and potential. In automata this is more obvious, especially in the way they have been rembered. Few of the great automata of delight still exist, only damaged fragments that show nothing of their reported magnificence. Von Kempelen1s chess playing Turk , burnt to nothing in the USA. and the tattered skeletal remains of what maybe Vaucanson1s wondrous anatomical duck still holds a place of speculation in Paris. Where they once stood is a series of mythologies, stories of their uniqueness that occupy their historical position. The greatest being Edgar Allen Poe's version of the chess player. The magnetism of fiction is always irresistible drawn towards other versions of itself. Especially if the fact in machine might be a folded, hidden human. The ventriloquist is part of that, a machine operator, and a minder for a mechanical other.
Arthur Worsley is a deeply imbedded memory from my early years. Having always been attracted to the original and the unusual. His act was mesmerising for me. The strangeness of it is concealed by the fierceness of its humour and by its devastating expertise.Because Worsley and his dummy (or a version of it) had been together for so long and because of its insistent, violent control, they attracted continual Comparison to one of the more enduring fictions attached to ventriloquism. Popular culture loves to compound ideas and images especially when they are bizarre ones so Worsley and Charlie Brown were often associated with the darker fictions of cinema.
The theme of a malevolent dummy becoming psychologically dominant over its master, stealing and warping their personality has graced at least four feature films including the significant 1956 British thriller Of Dead Of Night, and the later remake Magic. The evil puppet, doll, child or small creatures are resilient images. Life breeds in any mistake and the threat of the loss of our species superiority is also a good one. Especially when it so beautifully mirrors the neurotic polished surface of individual insecurity. Worsley had to continually denied that Charlie Brown was a living separated part of himself, stating that he was only a piece of wood kept in a case with a spare head or two.
The late Stanley burns the noted American ventriloquist and author of highly entertaining and informative book, OTHER VOICES. Had a professional anger about the insistent eruption of evil doll, plot motif. He devotes a chapter to this cinematic blemish on the noble ventriloquil art. Even though in earlier chapters he traces voice-throwing back through fake mediumship, witchcraft, and oracular worship, he still finds the taint of the theme to be an unbearable malice to the good will of the genial, comic stage performance. Burns wants to purge the weirdness from the wonder, seeing no obvious kinship inside his craft.
For me the truth is the opposite.A man standing on a stage telling jokes through a piece of wood only has a momentary humour. His ability to clench his mouth in an unnatural lock while speaking through grinning teeth is nothing without the illusion of transient secondary life. The imbuing of character into inert matter is A magical act even in its most basic concept, even for its most ridiculous purpose. As a performer one becomes aware that it is the process of unfolding an image or atmosphere that open both the audiences commitment and their power to extend it. The limited life of a carved dream is more than its moment in the spotlight, it is in the cradle of the audience1s memory where it will grow and the evolution of its significance can change.
Joseph Campbell sites(sic) the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius in his demonstration of the power and depth of make-believe, in The Psychology of Myth, In his magnificent Masks of God. A professor is writing at his desk, while his 4 year daughter is disturbing him running about the room. So he gives her 3 burnt matches, saying "here! play!" And sitting on the rug she begins to play with the matches, Hansel , Gretal and the witch. A considerable time elapses, then the child shrieks. The father jumps "what is it ? what has happened? In every sign of great fright the child cries"Daddy, Daddy take the witch away! I cant touch the Witch any More!" "An eruption of emotion" Frobenius observes is characteristic of the spontaneous shift of an idea from the level of the sentiments to that of sensual consciousness. Furthermore, the appearance of such an eruption obviously means that a certain spiritual process has reached a conclusion. The match is not a witch; nor was it a witch for the child at the beginning of the game. The process, therefore, rests on the fact that the match has Become a witch on the level of the sentiments and that the conclusion of the process coincides with the transfer of this idea to the plane of consciousness. The observation of the process escapes the test of conscious thought, since it enters consciousness only after or at the moment of completion. However inasmuch as the idea Is, it must have become. The process is creative, in the highest sense of the word; for as we have seen, in a little girl a match can become a witch.
Briefly stated then : the phase of becoming takes place on the level of the sentiments, while that of being is on the conscious plane. The parallel here to the suspension of disbelief is obvious. The limitation of the frame of entertainment is sometimes unwittingly plugged into the power of much a deeper embedded causeway of understanding.
Following Robert Graves wisdom in The White Goddess, we learn that the public theatre grew out of the de churching of sacred ritual and evolved into entertainment. The poet becoming the court jester instead of the shaman. All stages acts on their way into television have grown from that impetuous hybrid. Conjuring, illusions and ventriloquism still show some residual horns to their ancestory. The Demon Doll is of course well-established in sympathetic magic. Which might explain John Logie Baird choice of subject for the first successful televisual image, in 1925 "which appeared in almost unbelievable clarity", the flickering image of STOOKY BILL, the head of ventriloquists dummy.
To my knowledge no malign or truly sinister act as yet been invented. Mischief, rudeness and bodily functions seem to sit inside the locked gateway of invention, although the dimension of harsh and colourful language sometimes rattled the cage. Even Charlie Brown or one of his heads was sometimes known to explode into maniacal Anglo Saxon tongues. But only to test the gullibility and patience of the stage director in rehearsals. The Demon doll act is yet to be seen. The truth is that worsley's act was far more subtle than that. The exchange of personalities and powers were not on stage, or hidden in the ventriloquist home, but in the minds of the audience. Worsley joyfully played with expectation and the tradition of rolls, making a displacement of subserviance. So that the audience teeter on the edge of embarrassment and cruelty, which colours the watching of the berated vent. Uneasy about our position of mirth. Who are we laughing with, who are we laughing at? OR maybe who is laughing at us.
FILM OF BUNKARA PUPPETS/ BJORK ROBOTS AND CYBER PIXIE
The Uncanny valley is a phrase coined by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori which describes a plummeting dip in an elegant graph he conceived, that plotted emotional response to artificial humans. His thesis that the closer a robot resembles a human being, the more affection or feeling of familiarity it should engender is halted by a wave of revulsion half way across its ascent. If you draw a straight line from a healthy human to a perfect robot in the axes of familiarity and similarity, at the point where the robot is nearly lifelike, a certain creepiness of even downright horror takes over and the positive emotional response collapse. Where the machine almost resembles humanity, the sympathy of the onlooker ceases, and revulsion takes its place. People begin to notice not the charming human characteristics of the robot but the creepy zombielike differences. "That's where every neuron of the spectator is focused on what's wrong with the robot, on what's not quiet right" says Bruce Blumberg of Synthetic character programme at MIT Jasia Reichardt explains that in the development of false limbs, accuracy can be a curse; " If you shake an artificial hand (that you perceive to be real) you may not be able to help jumping up with a scream, having receives a horrible, cold, spongy grasp"
When it comes to the invented human People generally relate better to animated figures that are distinctly outlandish than those that begin to approach the ideal This is where the strange can be streamlined towards delight. The data harvested from Mori's graph is now basic fact used in the design of responsive, interactive robots. The Human Computer Interaction institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have refined the features to a series of measurable statistics that can be reproduced to create a face that is desirable and free of alarm. Although some of their objectivity seems a little murky. I quote, "We were curious to know how much that dimensions of a robot's head differed from the dimensions of human heads. We combined the dimensions of the facial features of the Mona Lisa, Michaelangelo's David, George Bush and Brittany Spears to develop a prototypical human head. We realise that this is not an average head. We chose these faces to make the comoposition from because they provide a general representation of the idealised human face." There conclusion proved open to conjecture. But their measurements of the perfect face offer great insight to artist and artificial human inventors.
Sometimes the calibrations of strangeness can be directly used. Chris Cunningham's computer altered cyber pixie Fi-Fi is a brilliant example of our attention being magnetically stolen, And Mori's imaginative graphs are translated into a sermon in the process of becoming.
The examples of the occupants of the niches on the steep walls of the valley also describe a mythological and literate space. He sites; unhealthy people, Bunraku puppets, dolls, stuffed toys, handicapped people, a No mask of a skinny man and at its nadir the ultimate human fear, the moving dead. The bottom of the uncanny valley is a very bad place to be. But we know this cast list, we have become familiar with them, Cinema has employed them for years to make our flesh crawl. Recently the pit has become heavily populated. Hollywood has harnessed endless versions of the graphic undead, mutant zombies and the rest of this vengeful agitated tribe to mate with our shock.
So much so that the visual icons of the alarmingly uncanny have become muffled and separated from the power of their raw archetype. But the more subtle and in some ways more disturbing forms are stacked much higher, closer to the rim of normality. Up there the oddities that delight us with their uniqueness directly face their twins across the gorge, the others, those that generate unease and distaste. Both reflections force us to work harder at a logical recognition, an interpretation that can shimmer between them. Their agreed resonance is hungry for sympathetic vibrations. This Hitchcockian ridge is where WE do the work, balancing anticipation and speculation against instinct and conventional knowledge. Attempting to transmute the ominous into common sense.
It is also a natural habitat for other false humans and their inventive operators. Rich in the nutrients of myth and ingenuity. A place where a Worsleyisan Virgil would guide us around the brim of the pit while demonstrating their skill in performing the Frobenius process. so that we might be able to talk back to a lump of wood or a burnt match, and an eruption of emotion might just be laughter or applause.
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