Huawei Talk: Diverging from the Uncanny Valley
I gave a 90-minute talk for in-house CG researchers and product designers.
Language: Japanese (with simultaneous interpretation in Mandarin and English)
Computer graphics research has historically pursued increasing realism and convergence toward the “ground truth”. In contrast, artistic and creative practices have often discovered new textures and aesthetics precisely within the noise, distortions, and errors produced by technological constraints computational processes themselves.
This talk examines how such technical “side effects,” failures, and creative misuses evolve into visual styles that become embedded in visual culture and eventually generate industrial demand. Drawing from examples in independent animation, new media art, and Internet aesthetics, the presentation explores how unintended artifacts can transition from experimental practices into widely adopted visual languages. The talk also discusses how characteristic artifacts and instabilities found in recent neural rendering techniques, including NeRF and 3D Gaussian Splatting, are being reinterpreted as emerging expressive territories, illustrated through the speaker’s own creative practice.
Takeaways
- Expression often begins as misuse
- Avant-garde practice can function as expressive R&D
- New media need a "wilderness" beyond intended use
- More exchange with creative practitioners in the wild