There was a time that I would pour through magazines, scrutinizing the ads just to pick out the spots where someone had used computer graphics. I would hold the paper close to my face, picking out the transitions between graphics and picture, where the colors or textures didn't quite match, the focus was slightly off, or where the lighting was skewed. Whenever I saw CG on TV I would reflexively blurt out "computer graphics" under my breath. The morphing faces in Michael Jackson's Black or White video really caught my attention. Even the noise made by that freakish beast, the Formerly Dark King of Pop, did not keep me from watching the damned thing over and over, stepping through it frame by frame on our new 4-head VCR.
So let's say that I have a unhealthy fascination for digital imagery. I really appreciate the way digital artists are getting closer and closer to fooling the eye. Nowadays, sometimes the only way I can tell that something was cooked up on silicon is that it would be too fantastic and expensive to do any other way. I get a deep, visceral thrill from masterpieces like this big, fat QuickTime movie Duality. I can taste the hours that those two guys poured into every detail. Even severely flawed travesties of entertainment and ravagers of expectations like Episode I are able to hold my attention because of their CG wizardry. Needless to say, Terminator 2 and The Matrix had my eyeballs popping out of my head like Quaid in Total Recall. Sometimes, when I'm sitting in my cube writing painfully obvious crap about error messages that no one is ever going to see, let alone need to consult documentation about, I wonder why I'm not spending my time obsessing over images a pixel at a time.
But all technology has a dark side, be it metallurgy, nuclear fission, or basket weaving. Just because we can construct an atom bomb doesn't mean we should. Just because we can record Macy Gray's screech and distribute it to the four corners of the earth and saturate the airwaves with it doesn't mean we should. Just because we can realize something from our imagination with computer graphics doesn't mean we should. Sometimes ideas should be kept locked behind flesh and bone. Sometimes something that sounds great in theory is simply repulsive in practice. I'm not just talking about easy targets like that abomination Jar Jar Binks, may his flabby lips and eyestalks be sliced off slowly with 20-lb. notebook paper. No, I'm talking about smiling cats, talking babies, singing bellybuttons, and courting ziti.
Someone decided that people hadn't already anthropomorphized cats enough with various cartoon characters and canned-food names that sound like something you'd find on the menu at Spago. That someone pitched their ideas to some pet-product producer who gave the go ahead for a small army of technicians, animal trainers, filmmakers, and computer artists to make a cat smile a big fat smile full of big fat human teeth. This is as natural as farting golf balls and just about as arresting and pleasing.
Speaking of arresting, the folks who think that talking babies are cute should be detained and thrown in a cell with the folks who think the ungodly Precious MomentsTM rubbish is cute. There they can spend their time talking about nauseatingly cutesy crap until they begin to starve, ultimately forced to kill and eat each other.
Then there are the singing belly buttons. How hip (pun slightly intended). These birth scars yap and warble with exuberance. They're all ecstatic that the new style in jeans is to wear them low enough to show your pubes. They should enjoy their time in the sun, for it's only a matter of time before they're upstaged by the next fad: beaded pubic-hair braids. But this is beside the point. Belly buttons are not all that attractive. They give you a weird blackboard scraping sensation in the small of your back if you poke about in them too vigorously. Watching them gape and articulate makes my skin crawl.
Finally there's the talking ziti. What I'm supposed to see is a precocious couple of pasta tubes deliriously happy to be slathered in pasta sauce and cheese, and baked. Instead, I see two gelatinous worms flirting with each other, smeared with menstrual flow, squirming together enrobed in strings of mucus.
So who knows? Maybe it's a good thing that I'm a cube dweller rather than an artist forced to prostitute my passion to animate pasta tampons.
Pakeha