Realism: What's Real and What's Not?

Reflection after a lecture on realism...

Something I again became interested in after thinking about it is that of realism. I began thinking about realism in film and how the technology we have now and how it will advance in the future gives us the opportunity and potential to create more and more realistic characters, environments and objects in computer graphics. We can already create photo realistic art, how long before we start to question what's real and what's not, when CG develops to a level so realistic that we wouldn't be able to tell the difference from a model and the real thing itself?

Photorealism is a close step artists have already made to re-creating reality, in some cases you can't tell whether its real or not. But will CG head this way too? Will it be possible? As novelist, Nikolai Chernishevsky said "the first purpose of art is to reproduce reality". It seems like reality is something we strive for and whether its possible or not, I expect people will continue to try and recreate reality in CG. 

On the topic of photorealism my mind came across a book I read back during college, 'MA'CLAIM: finest photo realistic graffiti'. 'MA'CLAIM' is a group of talented graffiti artists who produce photo realistic graffiti all around the world. I remember when I saw their work in this book, I couldn't beleive that some of this had been done with spray paint. I've included some of their images below:

Whether or not CG with eventually get to the same stage as some of the traditional art out there at the moment is unsure. One question I think of is would realistic CG be better than what we have at the moment. I'm not entirely convinced it will. Take Pixar for example, the most successful animation studio in the world. Their films take a less realistic approach and more artistic,  Pixar focus on narrative and story and they manage to capture this well with the characters they create and the level of realism their characters are made at. Monsters Inc. just wouldn't be as entertaining if Sully and Mike were were fully realistic monsters and thats how we like animation and its one of the things which makes animation visually pleasing, its artistic quality rather than realistic. 

It's kind of scary to think that in the future we might not be able to tell whether what we are looking at is the real thing or not. Actors are already getting the bodies scanned into computers so that 40 years later they can be recreated in films where they need to be alot younger. Of course you wouldn't be able to capture the soul of the actor and it would be up to how good the animators were to produce a good acting role. 

I'm sure that in 10-15 years we will have reach this level of realism in CG but I also don't think that realism is the best option in animation. Games like final fantasy already have scenes where they are getting close to looking very realistic. But like I was discussing in a seminar, a character from final fantasy as realistic as it may be might not be as appealing to look at as maybe a black and white image of some apples. Take a look at this new advert for Twinnings tea, if realistic would it be better, personally no, the artistic strokes and beautiful texture of the animation is all in its character which is something I really doubt could be achieved with realistic CG:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdkcsDueSMM

In a concluding manner I really like this quote by Lev Manovich stating "as 3D synthetic imagery is used more and more widely in contemporary visual culture, the problem of realism has to be studied afresh". It kind of sums up the idea that the more and more realistic 3D gets, the more and more we would question whether something is real or not, which seems like quite an unnerving thought, to not know what is real.