Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [55]
The technical English verbiage seemed to be driving the language tincture out of her head. “I think I understand. What you do is like photography.”
“Right! Very much like photography! Solid photography. The plastic’s expensive, but we can carbonate it. We can get cheap Three-D foam objects that are mostly gas. The real fun is in whipping it all the way up to aerogel. That way, we can make a structure the size of an elephant that weighs about three kilos.”
Maya gazed respectfully at the machine. “That’s a big tank, but it’s not big enough for an elephant.”
“You make the elephant in pieces and then you laminate the sections together,” Eugene explained, rolling his eyes slightly.
She spoke carefully. “I’m sorry. I’m not normally this stupid, but I’m on drugs.”
Eugene burst into laughter. “You’re a lot of fun.”
“So you’re a sculptor? An artist?”
“Artifice isn’t art.”
“Are you an engineer, then?”
“Artifice isn’t engineering. Let me show you something else. You’re a couture model, right? You ought to find this intriguing.”
Eugene led her over to a life-sized plastic nude sprawling on the floor. The nude woman was lying on her back with her hands laced behind her head and a vague expression of animal bliss.
“Who’s your model?”
“She’s nobody. And everybody. See, Muncheners are very big on nude sunbathing. We just went down to the Flauchersteg one Sunday last summer, and we scanned a bunch of people with our spex. Then we did a physical composite of all the models, a collation in our virtuality. Then we output the collation in plastic, and we got her: The Average Nude Munchener Sunbathing Woman.” Eugene looked at the statue with pride, then jerked his thumb over his lab-coated shoulder. “We got her husband, Mr. Nude Munchener, stashed over there in the corner; he’s a little hard to see right now because his finish wore off and his substance is semi translucent.”
“Right.”
“You can see that as a model she’s not particularly compelling; I mean, entirely average people are unremarkable by definition, wouldn’t you say? But creating this image was just the first step. My next concept was to get about a hundred men to look at her—while wearing spex, of course, so we could track the movement of their attention.”
“How’d you get a hundred people to stare at a nude plastic statue?”
“Well, we just bicycled her down to the Marienplatz and made it a performance event. The tourists were real cooperative.”
“Oh.”
“Then we collated our attention statistics in an algorithm and plotted it in virtuality and fused it out. Come have a look.”
He strolled over to a corner and whipped away a thin black sheet.
“Wait a minute,” Maya said, “I … I know this thing. It’s the …”
“The Venus of Willendorf.”
“That’s it. That’s her.”
“My original conjecture was that we were going to output the most beautiful woman in the world,” Eugene said, “a feminine form that would absolutely compel male attention! But what we got here is basically a pretty good replica of something that a Paleolithic guy might have whittled out of mammoth tusk. You start messing with archetypal forms and this sort of thing turns up just like clockwork.”
“What’s the man look like?”
“The man as seen by men, or the man as seen by women?”
“The man as seen by women.”
Eugene shrugged. “Somehow I knew you’d ask that.… Well, have a look.” He crossed the floor of the studio and removed another sheet.
“What went wrong?” Maya said.
“Well, we’re not quite sure. We think maybe it was our sampling procedure. I mean, you get these two rather odd artificer guys, me and Franz, asking total female strangers in the Marienplatz to put on spex and stare at a naked plastic guy.… We got a few volunteers, but it was kind of a small self-selected crowd of women, and this is what we ended up with.”
The statue was a big angry-looking horned mask connected to a swollen bunch of bulging bubbles.
“It looks like they tried to boil him to death.