Wafa Bourkhis's blog

From Mimesis, mimes to masksand simulation: Study on different kinds of representation of human behavior andappearance:

When I hear the term simulation, I refer it tothe imitation of the real life, space and behavior of human, body, life andappearance.

Since Plato’s theory about the mimesis of theart as imitation of real and ideal beauty, the artist wants to represent theworld where he lives such as fine artists and comedians.

The first subject which took the artists toimitate this ideal beauty was the human body and this by the painting and thesculpture. They used fictional comedies and tragedies to imitate life’ssituation and especially human behavior or action such as said Aristotle.

Michael Davis, a translator and commentator of Aristotle writes: “Atfirst glance, mimesis seems to be a stylizing of reality in which the ordinaryfeatures of our world are brought into focus by a certain exaggeration, therelationship of the imitation to the object it imitates being something likethe relationship of dancing to walking. Imitation always involves selectingsomething from the continuum of experience, thus giving boundaries to whatreally has no beginning or end. Mimesis involves a framing of reality that announces that what is containedwithin the frame is not simply real. Thus the more "real" theimitation the more fraudulent it becomes”[1]

When painter works on human body and herepresents all gestures he do and all facial expressions and positions of the shapes,he imitates the model’s one, especially when he describes graphically thisbody. So he tries also to imitate all light’s behavior on this body and on allthe objects in the spaces around it.

This meaning of mimesis takes us to the resemblance;model can be identified in this painting such as in sculpture or other fine artthat took the material to make all kind of bodies to produce beauty.

By using rules of the perspective’s techniques,all artists worked on the imitation of different human positions and movements;such as in the baroque era. Illusion has been integrated also in theatre scenesto give the fiction all senses of imitation of reality and give the mirror ofhuman lives.

According to Aristotle, Mimesis doesn’t meanonly the imitation of the forms or the representation of the real, but his “Poetics,defines the theater as a "imitation (mimesis)" of the «people inaction ", " by means of an action ", and not of a narrative, asin the epic, for example.. Even if, defined so, the notion seems vague, itemerges from it all the same that she can use as well linguistic and textualsigns (the tragic verse) as those, the not linguistic, a representation(decoration, space, actors). The mimesis is thus at first the manufacturing ofa new object, autonomous with regard to its model, real. Now sometimes wereduced her to be only a copy of the reality, sometimes we spread itsspecificity beyond the limits fixed by Aristotle.”

By this definition of the mimesis given byAristotle, we can understand the appeal of the artists to the mime that triesto imitate gestures and movements and expressions of face as well as soundsindependently of the text, and dialogue in the theater. The art of puppetry hasmarked the history of theater to imitate the lives of human beings as smallmachinery for their lives and tell their stories.

With the advent of the photography and thecinema, the imitated human behavior took another way, it becomes more realistic…The theater of mime becomes then the silent movies and little by little theartists returned towards the scenario to look for new aesthetic values of thehuman behavior. Since the invention of the Computer, the artists tried toimitate the reality and to try to develop the technologies to reach more andmore their wanted realism.

So artists, Scientifics tried to imitate humansby invention of all kinds of robots - physical or virtual ones- to see how works the human body in touching objects, talking,etc.

In instance they created Virtual Reality toimitate the human behavior and create other worlds to try how works the humanbody in them.

Harold Cohen said " The machine interestsme for the only reason: she allows modeling certain aspects of the human brain.What interests me it is the way the human beings work. The running of machinesimports me little.”

Human behavior was imitated by computer for thefirst time by Mike Normal, a digital puppet created in real time by Brad Grafand Michael Wahrman and modeled by Ken Cope. It was a first simulation of thehuman brain as an Artificial Intelligence. A digital mask speaks on the screenwith a digital voice it was better than fixed masks used in theater that limitshuman feeling and facial expressions.

So, as Pier said, that “there are also other kinds of simulations that could be called “behavior simulations”. Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, Robotics simulate the behavior of the living organisms. Sometimes certain complex behaviors of the living organisms spontaneously may emerge in robotics, A-Life, synthetic biology, showing a sort of “third life” in evolution.”

The invention of the internet has changed allkinds of interactions, especially after developing the computer graphics andvirtual reality which hashelped artists to simulate human behavior. Indeed, the invention of DataGloves, sensors, e that permitted human real body to interact with a digitalcreature in a virtual environment.

With these inventions, human bodies andappearances was imitated by the 3D modeling which opened the imagination of the artistsand the scientists to create virtual worlds which mix the human body withdigital ones. And to represent the ideal human behavior, they chose to createspecialized software and virtual worlds to end in the realism.

In these virtual worlds, user can simulate hislife and their ability of living with others and his communication andinteraction with other societies. He uses his Avatar to experiment his virtuallife.

By creation ofMMORPG, players can experiments their reflex and their muse and intelligence tosee how they can react in worse situation, and it let him know all his abilityto manage his battlefield for example. As Pierre LEVY said about the role ofsimulations is to:” Decline phenomena or situations according to all theconceivable variations, to envisage all the consequences and the implicationsof a hypothesis, to know better objects or complex systems of the fictitiousuniverses on a playful mode”[2]

To simulate real life, artists and Scientificscreated MUVE (multiuser virtual environments) to create a virtual life such asSecond Life. In this virtual world, users (or Slifers) can simulate all humanbehavior and see if they can use their brain skills independently with theirbody ones.  He can use his avatar to createanother personality and imitate human behavior and life. Avatar can have otherjob than the user’s real one, another appearance, another shape and anotherbody skins, etc…

 By beingconnected with other users he can have another role in the virtual society byhis choice. He can be a musician in the morning, a lawyer in the afternoon, anda sexy woman in the evening.

So, Second Life allows user to be a digitalactor that can imitate human body and change his role does not consist ininterpreting a role in a fiction nor to play to amuse simply, but to feign itslife, its behavior and its feelings and sensations to various situations.Avatar in Second Life, can walk, moving, flying, getting married, making sex,building, buying and paying, selling products, laughing, make gestures, etc.

The presence in the virtual environment makesavatars more real than the reality, because they are allowed to use all theirimagination to create their own business without having problems with realproblems like the ability to travel and to move. A wheel chair man can be richwith his mind in this virtual world, simply by imagination of his virtualproducts by simply clicking on the mouse and taping on his keyboard or if hecan’t he can just talk in voice chat to manage his enterprise.

"But what’s newhere is this art exists in a space that’s accessible and interactively enabledworldwide. Second Life is a “sim,” otherwise known as a simulated environment,in which anything can be built using objects called “prims,” or primitives. Andthe tools available in Second Life to design the prims allow for stag­geringeffects: SL artworks are unfettered by real-life constraints on shape, size ormaterials; artwork may have unlimited forms and properties, and may be easilyor continuously modified; visitors may teleport or fly into and “through” theart, which can scale, replicate, shift or change in any way its creator wishes,at any speed and within any time frame." [3]  

In the recent movie “AVATAR” of James Cameron,Jack SULLY is a wheel chaired man who interacts by virtual reality with theNavi’s habitants of PANDORA to simulate his ability to communicate with virtualcreatures that are not imitating human appearances but just their behavior intheir virtual planet.

Simulation is not only mimesis of humanappearance in AVATAR, but we can see a large mix between real bodies, virtualbodies and environments.

 AccordingEmmanuelle GLON[4],virtual worlds are simulations, while they review a cognitive processunderlying three types of activities:
1. The construction of perceptual images in the absence of appropriatestimuli
2. The creation of psychological and behavioral situations
3. The re-creativeactivity award of mental states

When we see the making of this movie, we cansee the huge imagination of the director and the sophisticated technology tomanage this filmmaking.

Cameron has created virtual cameras that filmshuman bodies and visualize them as virtual avatars on the screen. Avatar’sfacial expressing are made by linking real actors with the technology of motioncapture which has developed J-C and his the first one who created captors forthe human facial animations and the virtual cameras.

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