The Tragedy of Photorealism
Images are precious. When made with care and attention, images can be beautiful, complex, and worth gazing at for hours. Generations of painters have devoted their talent to rendering the complexity of human experience using a multitude of creative visual styles. Such images must be sought: they rest in Churches, in the high places of state, and now too in museums. And such images offer promises of what is precious becoming real - of glory, of peace, and of heaven on earth.
Giotto, Joachim’s Dream
For the first time in history, images are becoming common. And the future promises even more. People already are spending their time in fully virtual worlds, every moment of unique experience created painstakingly by a team of artists. Live-action movies once determined by the limited reproduction technology of chemical film is increasingly becoming a collage of captured images and subtle but devoted work by CGI modelers and animators. The artists of today do not work any less hard than those of the past - the Sistine Chapel took far less man hours than the effects in the most recent Marvel movie - but their results are not worth the same attention. Where the care and labor of the past went into refining these visions of the world and of possibility, now they are slavishly fed into the great engine of making everything look exactly like reality. And this is a tragedy, because humanity has the opportunity to inhabit a whole world as beautiful as the most trained imaginations can conjure, but instead has opted for an uncreative default.
Artists do not just render the world as they see it, they create new ways of seeing. For example, East-Asian landscape painting expresses mood, a way of seeing the world, that is not obvious from simply looking at the scene that was painted. This goes beyond the artist’s individual ideas or expression (artists tend to share styles with their contemporaries) but does represent an actual product of human creativity. Even in nearly photorealistic painting the goal is not to imitate reality but to reveal something deeper about the scene, which is what makes a painting worth looking at in a way that the everyday would not be. The actual realism of a scene is a technical exercise, and the true artistry of image-making is everything else.
Sesshu Toyo, View of Ama-no-hashidate
Photorealism has been a benchmark and goal since the earliest days of computer graphics. As a technical pursuit both in graphics hardware and rendering software this makes sense since reality is extremely challenging to mimic with all its complexities. It has made significantly less sense as an aesthetic. Entire decades of video-game graphics which attempted to capture realistic environments and people are now horribly obsoleted and in fact were never interesting to look at in the first place. Most video games since the advent of 3D have fit into this paradigm with notable and important dissenters. Grim Fandango based its choice of setting and design on the observation that most 3D games looked like Day of the Dead masks anyway, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and Okami each leaned into the limited capabilities of their hardware in an attempt to produce something beautiful and lasting. There are lots of 3D art styles which are beautiful and interesting, but they are not dominant or even a plurality of what is done.
Okami
Why is photorealism the default, even when it looks bad? One factor is that a century of film culture has led to a preference for photography as a higher register of art1. The lofty stage play was the prototype of cinema and the successful early animation was targeted mostly towards children. Therefore even as the key sequences of films (the concluding one hour battle scene) are now almost entirely done by visual effects teams with actors faces and gestures pasted in, they still need to maintain that key look of verisimilitude to maintain the genre’s serious character. Video games, always an envious partner of cinema in America’s entertainment industry, followed the same convention even when the quality of their efforts was far less. Any sort of “serious” game intended for adults tends to use as its default the photorealistic paradigm. That there has been such an explosion of animation in these last decades but relatively little interest in the stylistic animators of the 20th century such as Yuri Norstein is also disappointing. But it has become the default.
Tale of Tales, Yuri Norstein
This default is growing with the charge forward towards non-gaming virtual worlds, known under the collective title of the Metaverse. Due to the limits of hardware and networking technologies, most existing platforms have settled for a neutral cartoonish avatar representation. These do not fall entirely to the photorealistic paradigm, but they do not have particular style, any particular aesthetic, any new creative way of looking at the world. They are intentionally neutral, the foundation for communications platforms where all expressions will be individualized by the use of a totally barren playing field.
Meta’s Horizon Worlds
This is clearly just a technological necessity though, and all the major players are heading further in the direction of photorealism. Unity and Unreal both provide incredible tech demos with ultra-realistic facial animation, Meta has been clear about their dedication to perfect avatar representations for the future, and most importantly no dissenting paradigms have even been offered. Minecraft and Roblox are perfectly successful engaging billions of users without ever touching 3D photorealism, but they can be dismissed like animation as for children. Realism is the only acceptable aesthetic for this future. This will be technically harder to achieve - photorealism was chosen as a benchmark partially for its difficulty, its infinite polygons, the extreme detail of light and fabric simulation - but it is the path that has been chosen.
Unreal Engine’s Metahuman creation tool
This more difficult, worse path was our default. That a more creative vision of what the world can look like has not won out is a civilization level failure, a total inability to do what is good because we would rather do something technically harder than have to make serious creative and stylistic commitments to a perspective. We could make a virtual world that captures the floating feeling of impressionist painting, or the sublime contemplation of an East Asian landscape, or the beauties of heaven portrayed in the Renaissance, or the mysterious symbolic world of Journey (2012). We could in fact make all those worlds, and make them interoperable and allow people to live in beautiful spaces beyond their daily life. But we have decided that this is too hard, too against the ruling principle of corporate neutrality, and we will leave humanity to inhabit a lesser version of the visual space they already have.
The appeal of photorealism goes beyond this. More realistic styles of rendering human figures in the Renaissance overtook the previous Medieval paradigm for a reason. However it is important to note that the Renaissance artists were not trying to portray reality as they saw it, and instead were painting ideal types. The realistic painted portrayal of everyday life would only follow after centuries. This path through art history is outside of the scope of this post but is surely relevant and worthy of follow-up.