Anastasia Kozlova and Raquel Villa
I (Nastya) have been (and still am) going through the extreme anger and vigorous satisfaction-fueled stage of adapting to SideFX Houdini for production workflow. I've been watching countless tutorials made by German Houdini artists, simultaneously sending them over to my girlfriend, with whom we've giggled about the German accent and reflected on the humor of Houdini developers. Thanks to her, Schweine Kopfe ("Pig head" in German, a test model embedded in SideFX Houdini), a sillier character side of the usable Pig Head Test Geometry, was born.
Some time later, on a Friday lunch break from work with much wiser colleagues, we were having a conversation about the memes within the Houdini community, trying to find gems within Google Images or Reddit and drafting slightly girly images with Pig Head Test Geometry. We found some examples we could relate to, but only a few could be called silly interpretations of the software interface (Ill. 1). Most of them also seemed demographically homogenous (should we specify the demographic of a software, heavily used by a vfx industry or is it quite obvious?). The main difference between them and what you'd usually see on neosurreal shitpost Instagram accounts (Ill. 4) was the lack of metaphorical subversion and recontextualization. They tended to reflect the painful learning pipeline rather than involving other discourses (Ill. 2), or, to put it simply, mixing everything, everywhere, all at once without fear of silliness.
That's why I suggested that my colleague Raquel think about a new way of introducing humour that's relatable for us and that can make Houdini fandom more accessible to others. In one of our conversations, Raquel mentioned that the valuable token within the Houdini community is not usually a personalized relationship with the software, but rather cool HDAs (Houdini Digital Assets) and efficiency skills. And this wasn't a big revelation, as authority lies with VFX houses heavily integrated into high-rank pipelines. They are often deprived of heavy design implications and focus on executing the perfect mechanism to achieve the highly realistic result. But realistically, AREN'T THE NODES CUTE? For me, cuteness and irony have been heavily embedded in the software interface from the very first look at it. Each node (a certain procedure to modify geometry) has a graphic icon that's supposed to describe this procedure in a nutshell. The icons are quite metaphorical and personalized, compared to Cinema 4D's generic geometrical pattern icons. For example, there's a weird cake-like geometry for FEM validate. or a child's yellow rubber boot for collision source, or POP awaken with a star frightened by the stripy ball, or an English bulldog for wrinkle deformer (Ill. 4). So, don't we have every right to look at them almost as sentient creatures?
We’re everyone is a girl-pilled, which encapsulates both the @everyoneisagirl collective practice and various media theorists’ work, who are carefully observing the unleash of the feminine in the internet. Johanna Walsh writes: “everyone becomes a girl when they log on to the internet, where users often share a confessional writing and shuttle back and forth between “cute” and “smart”. The reason the girl scene appeals to so many internet users is it embraces all the contradictory parts of being femme-leaning and being human - all the hotness and the grossness. It’s a subversive alternative to the narrow and noninclusive traditional ideas of womanhood’.”
The subversive power of the girliness can be expressed through the archetypical role of the trickster. In The Ambiguity of Play, Brian Sutton-Smith theorizes different rhetorics of play. He brings forward an analysis of the historical trickster figure and emphasizes how they “enacted playful protest against the orders of the ordained world”. Sutton-Smith brings our attention to how the trickster occupies a dialectical position within culture; she is simultaneously “the good and the bad, the sobriety and the insobriety, the body conventional and the body uncontrollable”.
And why do we use the word silly here? In the “Silly girl theory: scrolling through the digital”, Mela Miekus and Meta Medri, describe “sillify” within the media terrain in the following manner: ''To sillify: to propose a glitch to the hegemonic modes of doing and being, to perform actions, tasks, and relations in performatively silly ways that oppose neoliberal and patriarchal values.''
Thus a ''girl'' within the internet space brings the force of applying a new filter on common things. She seems just silly at first, but then you realise you never looked at things the way she has. She's a true adventurer, who is not afraid to receive a side-eye from the stubborn users.
Through practicing these meme visual gymnastics, we were wondering, what’s the how can we navigate the Houdini fandom through ''girl in the internet'' perspective? Can you perform HDA bro flex but also expand on the software elements state, make an attempt to animate them or give it a personalized perspective outside the pure software discourse and not be disregarded as a Houdini artist or be considered schizophrenic? Can you develop feelings for a node? Think it’s really cute and only want to use it because it makes you feel safe, even though it gives really bad results in the performance monitor? And finally, is it a valid way to co-live with the pressure of learning a complex software and being introduced to the new area of knowledge by looking at it from a more playful perspective,, speculating on its weirdness without being ashamed of it?
Here are some visual outputs from our members and others of CG community contribution! Any last words for the descendants and those who are inspired to frolic in a newly discovered Houdini fandom? Life turns into a cheesy ''before'' and ''after'' meme, when you start Houdini.