Lecture

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Chicago Humanities Festival

Facing Up to the Uncanny Valley Richard Gray Visual Art Series

ABOUT 

  • ABOUT Lawrence Weschler

    Lawrence “Ren” Weschler is CHF Artistic Director Emeritus. He is a graduate of Cowell College of the University of California, at Santa Cruz (1974). He was a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine for twenty years, shuttling between political tragedies and cultural comedies, and is the author of over a dozen books, including Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder for which he was a finalist for both the Pulitzer and National Book Critics Circle Award, and Everything that Rises; A Book of Convergences for which he received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 2007.

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Advance tickets are no longer available online or by phone for this program. Tickets will be available at the door. A $5 surcharge applies to all door tickets.

Will digital animators ever be able to render a believable human face? Successful in virtually every other regard (hands, bodies, crowds, quidditch matches!), they always stumble at the countenance. And it’s worse than that: past a certain point in creating a face (say, the 95-percent mark), right at the very brink of verisimilitude, the ickier things get. The animators keep falling into what they call the “Uncanny Valley”—the hypothesis that the more human a human representation becomes, the more strongly it repels us. Perhaps the face really is the seat of the soul, and souls just don’t lend themselves to digital approximation. Festival artistic director emeritus Lawrence Weschler returns to riff on these and other conundrums, drawing on his newest collection, Uncanny Valley and Other Adventures in the Narrative.

The annual Richard Gray Visual Art Series recognizes a significant gift from founding CHF board member and distinguished art dealer Richard Gray.

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