Talkin’ bout…
I just came across (in a conversation of spoken words–no link) an important distinction in forms of digital art–generated work vs. sampled work. The film industry muddles it a bit by referring to everything as “CGI,” and of course there’s plenty of gray area (a generated 3D geometric form that uses a sampled photographic texture, for example) but the difference between the two is striking. For the time being, anyway, sampled stuff just tends to contain more information that’s relevant to our human senses–the minute details that the physical world offers up for free.
People quickly (although temporarily, as it turns out) abandoned generating music synthesizers when sampling technology became cheap enough. And a ten-year-old kid (I checked on this) knows that Gladiator looks “more real” then Phantom Menace. (Both used lots of digital effects, but the first movie started with sampled footage of real actors and real tigers; the second movies’s effects were primarily generated.)
Incidentally, speaking of those gray areas…how about the philosphical problems posed by Gollum’s try for an Oscar nomination?