[NetBehaviour] Cuneiform and Altered Mocap

Alan Sondheim sondheim at panix.com
Mon Nov 5 09:22:33 CET 2018



Cuneiform and Altered Mocap

http://www.alansondheim.org/njitd24.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/cuneiform.jpg

>From Beginning Hittite, Held, Schmalstieg, Gertz,
Slavica, 1988 :

Five fundamental Hittite cuneiform strokes:

horizontal -
oblique (upper left to lower right) \
oblique (lower left to upper right) /
vertical |
the wedge (German Winkelhaken): "The Winkelhaken was produced
by pressing the end of the stick in the clay at a slight angle
from the upright position, thereby producing a near triangle,
the deepest part of which is the angle at the left." >

>From this of course, Hittite cuneiform is constructed. I've been
thinking about this - the five modular strokes, their
combinations, the spaces between the strokes, their combinations
which include more complex strokes and signs formed by stroke
clusters, tailed together for example. And how similar this is
to the basic imagery with the articulated figure in motion
capture - how a limited number of rods and joints can produce
complex semantics. So that in a sense there's a parallel to
cuneiform, even in the sense that, in cuneiform, linguistic
origin is critical (what language originally produced what sign)
- and with the articulated mocap figures, what somatic clues
might be read back into the figures; what for example might a
punctum be, as a signifier of a particular gesture? And beyond
that, of a particular emotional state for example?





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