Thursday, June 29, 2023

retrotalk2023: recreative garbage

Substack called Anglophone Xenotrope and person who goes as Thunder At Twilight riffs on the "conjunction of futuristic technology and retro" thing I mentioned in the last post. (Strictly speaking retrotalk2022 as the post - titled "The End of Culture" - is from the very end of last year). 

"Retreads, reboots and remakes were ascendant in the first decade of this new century but the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the return of the Star Wars franchise—combined with the digital       de-aging technology, pioneered by Industrial Light & Magic—added considerable fuel to the nostalgia fire.

"When Disney bought Lucasfilm and ILM, they were not just buying Star Wars; the work that Lucas had done in bringing dead actors back to the silver screen in the form of digital composites was arguably even more significant. To that end, the corporate giant has made integrating these creations into existing brands a core part of their corporate strategy.

Examples include: 

"Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, featuring actors wearing digital masks of the deceased Peter Cushing and the (then living) young Carrie Fisher"

and Marvel's use of 

"the technology to provide a curious kind of continuity, allowing much older actors to play younger incarnations of their characters in earlier eras."

and most recently (at the time of writing):

"the trailer for the new Indiana Jones film featuring a very respectable depiction of a much younger Harrison Ford."


Twilight at Thunder speculates:

"Seeing cutting edge digital rendering technology used as a means of rehashing and remaking the past leads one to reflect on possibly the ultimate manifestation of the mash-up: AI systems such as GPT and Stable Diffusion. Soon we might be able to look forward to machine created films, featuring digital recreations of characters from existing franchises.

".... AI models cannot create, even if their outputs are novel. By definition, these systems are synthesising based on statistical inferences."





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