Right, and here's the problem: how to imagine something completely different from anything one have seen before? (Ironicaly enough, this "patter matching" is loose enough to see the "face" on car bonnet). I was always amused by so-colled UFO eye-witnesses who depict completely anthropomorphous aliensjackS wrote: [...]Also, on a purely subjective note, the head seems... too familiar. It abides too well with the human brain's standard face-recognition pattern-matching features, where instead I'd hoped to cause sufficient jarring dissonance to lead towards a brief unease of uncertain origin arising upon viewing it.
Maybe. But the "upsidedown" look of the faces you've mentioned have a few in common with their proportions. Human pattern recognitons copes well with rotated patterns. The main source of confusion here is lighting. You see, human brain always think the light is above. It's hard-coded. Quite good assumption in any natural environment. Use a mirror and flashlight to see howjackS wrote: But... that's really hard to quantify. Suffice it to say, my hope was to get something that was unsettling, not because it evoked some sort of trigger like a snake/spider/creepy-crawly appearance seems to evoke on some low level, but to play off of the failure to evoke proper pattern matching to generate some fragment of the sense of "wrongness" that can be evoked by looking at something like http://www.youramazingbrain.org/superse ... dedown.htm and http://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/mona/mona.html or the sense of the bizzare that arises from unexpected or uncommon proportions in relation to similar structures (perhaps thinking along the lines of how we get spooked by shadows patterns and staring at random patterns in dark stucco ceilings) - thereby making it, if not truly alien, then a more alien sensory experience.
jackS wrote: Perhaps a resizing of the jaw and hinge to be somewhat more narrow, allowing the pivot point to be moved down and forward relative to the eyes, which could themselves be moved somewhat pushed slightly up, out, and forwards could make for an interesting "facial reconstruction surgery" - I think this might move it somewhat more along the lines of what I was looking for, or it might prove to not work out - but if you could, I'd like you to take a stab at some experiments with alterations along those lines, or any ideas of your own with respect to the head.
Just a few random ideas (completely ortogonal to the Aera desc:) What's about vertical mouth? 3 or more parts jaws? More than 2 eyes? Eyes on tentacles? Mouth w/ jaws at the lower portion of the body (closer to the digestal system) and breathing/speaking nostrils at forebody? Inside out? Eyes at front, below the jaws?
Yes, really. Partialy I did is such "familiar" because it "just work".jackS wrote: How far you want to go with exploration of the design space for the head is up to you - while the aesthetics are important to me, if it doesn't seem that there's going to be a novel form that also has reasonable function, go with a head that can feed the body over one that would only make sense when mounted on a wall.
jackS wrote: Any way one looks at it though, we're getting so close to you having created a truly wonderful finished product that, if I didn't have a conference submission deadline in just over a week, I'd run around smiling with joy (instead I'm going to pass out so I can get back to work at a reasonable hour - but at least I'll be going to sleep happy.)
Well-acquainted situation.