we’re walking in the air: a fine retrospective on David Bowie’s magical Christmas classic
The brilliant Kottke, maker of fine hypertext products, introduces us to a new type of uncanny valley in the form of composite three-dimensional masking.
While trying to capture the essence, the thing in itself, of personalities or politicians, one found that a sort of ventriloquist’s dummy is created and despite transferring personรฆ to different individuals, the original speaker still reverberates through gestures and facial expressions that come across as familiar and recognisable but look awkward and alien on the face of another. The eeriness and conflicted vocal cues is probably best illustrated in the video demonstration of the technique with talking-heads and statesmen found at the link above. The fear of anything that impersonates a living being is called automatonophobia (as in an automaton), which can include wax-figures and mannequins too.
Recognising what the world needs now, Pope Francis threw open the Mercy Gate of the Lateran Archbasilica (the Pope’s church as the Bishop of Rome) and declared an extraordinary Jubilee Year—a decade earlier than the next scheduled time of forgiveness and reconciliation, which are announced periodically at quarter- or half-century intervals.
Ordering the door to be unbricked (sealed in earnest outside of these periods), the Pope promises that this message of grace will counter the violence and fanaticism in the world—and in people’s hearts. Quite a few basilica-major around the world, including Saint Peter’s in the Vatican and Santiago de Compostela in Spain, have their own Holy Doors and their own tradition and millions of pilgrims are expected to pass through these thresholds over the next year. The Papal Bull—Misericordiรฆ Vultus—allows for bishops everywhere to declare his own Mercy Gate for this Year of Jubilee. After the ceremony and reflection, the faรงade of San Giovanni in Laterano became the canvas to promote mindfulness of another urgent threat to peace, environmental degradation, with a light-show of projected images of the natural world. His Holiness is primed to act on Mother Nature’s behalf as well.
