Triangles and Thelephobia

“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
― Cesar A. Cruz 

How many triangles do you see?

I am fascinated by triangle composition. Fantasy artists like Frank Frazetta often used triangle composition to create striking images for book covers. In photography, it is much less common. In 3d art, I may have seen it once or twice, but no more.

Personally, I am striving to use triangle composition more, because I like the way the eye is drawn to the image. I am still not quite used to it though, so it takes some thought to design pictures that work.

The picture above is a 3D render done with Daz 3D Studio. For this one, I used a Genesis 8 Female 3D model, with some slight modifications.

I built a virtual studio consisting of nothing more than two planes, and added a single light.

The light is a bit interesting. I used a 2x2 m plane, added a light emitting shader, and placed it 3m above the floor the model is sitting on. It was my first try with this kind of lighting, and I am very pleased with it. With a bit of practice, this may well become my preferred method to create studio lighting, and indoor lighting.

It is interesting that you can create professional level studio lighting, with a perfect model, at zero cost.

Perhaps the most interesting thing in the picture above is what you do not see: Nipples.

I cloned them out because of the thelephobic social media rules. (Thelephobia = Fear of nipples.)

If you are thelephobic, please don't look below this line of text, because the uncensored version of this picture is coming up.

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Here they are. Why anyone would find them offensive, I do not understand. Especially considering that male nipples are considered okay to show.

There is a big nipple-related problem though: Social media services, for fear of offending anyone, and thus lose customers, are imposing very strict rules against nudity, and other controversial topics. (Though violence is considered less dangerous, for some unfathomable reason.)

At the same times, they use algorithms designed to feed us more of what we were interested in the last few times we looked at something.

The result is that we get locked into very narrowly defined information bubbles. We are fed only what the algorithms decide we should be fed. We lose diversity, we lose other people's viewpoints.

This inevitably leads to evermore rigid thought control. We are trapped inside rapidly shrinking bubbles. At the end of the process is...nothing. No original thought. No room to be different.

Without variation, no progress is possible.
― Frank Zappa

What follows, eventually, is collapse. The world changes, but we won't, and then we go extinct. Even if our bodies continue to move for awhile, there will be no one there to have an interesting conversation with.

Thelephobia is not the cause, but it is a symptom.


Note about the art quote: The "art should comfort the disturbed..." quote is a variation on a quote by Finley Peter Dunne, and was originally about newspapers. The version about art has been attributed to a number of people, including Banksy. However, as far as I know, Cesar A. Cruz came up with it.