When I was younger, I was into jazz, being a musician with the trumpet as my main instrument. Later on in high school, it fit into my (somewhat misguided) bohemian asperations, and I stayed with it. But somewhere along the line, I lost track of it, not in any sort of conscious way, but as music is a reflection of one’s life and the music that you listen to reflects your mood or life at that moment, my life went in such a way that I stopped listening to to because it just didn’t fit into it at that time.

But a recently, I heard something, and decided to pick up some of my old albums, and I have not been able to put them down, specifically John Coltrane’s Live at the Village Vanguard and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come. These albums are ingrained into my memory (or what’s left of it) but the years that it has been since I have listened to them have given me a new perspective on them.

The big thing for me is the connection between what the early jazz artists were doing and the larger creative process. That is, the severing of the past for the creation of the new. Although later misinterpreted, the Futurists had a similar beliefs; in Marionetti’s manifesto, he called for the destruction of museums and libraries in order for art to move forward. A similar sort of attitude can be seen both in the title of The Shape of Jazz to Come and in the music, where it was a harbinger of a new style, breaking a lot of old rules of song structure, but doing so in order to move forward.

I was watching a video on CNet the on porn industry and the move to HD DVD the other day, and something in the video struck me as true, not just for porn, but for films at large. In the video, they mentioned that with filming in HD, it’s much harder to hide blemishes with makeup and other traditional movie magic, because everything is up there on display in HD. Where porn and other movies overlap is that they are both dependent on fantasy and the suspension of belief, and I wonder if the higher level of realism that HD, be it HD-DVD or Blu-ray, threatens that suspension of belief.

In 1970, a Japanese roboticist named Masahiro Mori put forth a hypothesis called the Uncanny Valley. In the hypothesis, he states that with robots, as the characteristics become more human-like, the more sympathy and empathy is aroused in the human observers. However, as the appearance and movement of the robot become less human-like, the response quickly becomes that of disgust, until a point at which the appearance is sufficiently non-human, and empathy levels return to that of a normal human to human interaction. Part of the reason for this response is that if there are more human characteristics, those differences that are non-human will be highlighted, and seen as repulsive (he gives the example of a zombie). But for those robots with more non-human features, the human characteristics will be what is highlighted, and garner empathy.

I bring this up because with this advancement of formats and media, I wonder if we have, or will come, to this Uncanny Valley in our home media formats. Already there have been many issues with CG characters in movies and television, such as the Final Fantasy movie, the Polar Express, or the new Orville Rendenbacher commerical, and numerous ones to come. I think that in this race for the bigger, better, higher definition media, we will run into this uncanny response, not necessarily with a CG character or robot, but with our own human reflection. At that point, we will have to take a step to one side of the valley or the other, be it either forward or backward.