This is only going to be a teaser – if that word even applies to a planned series of blog postings on a subject that might strike you as bleak and unpromising at first. Part of the essence of Artistic Energies has also been a love for the wilderness and what can happen in it. It’s strange, perhaps, to even say “in it” because what it contains is otherness – to be outside, in so many senses.
There are so many worthwhile questions to ask about the relationship between being in nature and being in technology – the ecology and psychology of each. I’ll try to get at a few of those questions that have intrigued us for years: Can technology be used as a means of escaping “back” toward reality? Do simulations of grandeur wrongly content us with simulation, or rightly extend our desires toward beauty? What beauty can we find as humans in inhuman places? And as a Benedictine monk recently asked me, Is the city itself the new wilderness? – a spiritual wasteland built on fear and self-protective distance against a super-powerful Nature and the possibility of either spiritual presence or spiritual absence.
Look for more on these topics in the days to come.
It’s in vogue to speak of the advancement of technology as a process that is simultaneously inevitable, and yet, without apparent awareness of contradiction, something which everyone needs to be on board with in order for progress to occur. Technology “wants” things, but relies on us to do its bidding, in the words of some commentators. I ran across these thoughts from W.H. Auden earlier today:
…it is our task to discover what everything in the universe, from electrons upwards, could, to its betterment, become, but cannot without our help. This means reintroducing into science the notion of teleology, long a dirty word. For our proper relation to nonliving things, the right analogy might be that of a sculptor. Every sculptor thinks of himself, not as someone who forcibly imposes a form on stone, but as someone who reveals a form already latent in it…
We have to realize that every time we make an ugly lampstand, we are torturing helpless metal., every time we make a nuclear bomb we are corrupting the morals of a host of innocent neutrons below the age of consent.
It would seem apropos to write this post on a milestone anniversary of the release of the film Koyaanistqatsi, but instead, it came to mind today, a Tuesday, 26 1/2 years later. This has been one of the most significant films of our time on the subject of life in a technological environment. Jacques Ellul’s thoughts figured heavily into director Godfrey Reggio’s vision of “life out of balance”. Ellul is also often on my mind – partly because his perspective is radical enough to be memorable: the city is doomed, so flee from it. Prophesy against it, but also pray for it, because though doomed, it has covered the entire earth, and swallowed much that was innocent. Though its dark heart (the prison, sharing some with Foucault’s thought on that) is irredeemable, there is yet something to be done – a meaningful mission into the technological simulacra that is not optional; we stay afloat or sink always deeper under its crushing pressure (these summary references are from The Meaning of the City).
Beyond Ellul, Reggio’s film explores the insanity of modernized life, the strange beauties within it, and the possible sources of fresh ideas in nature. A connection comes to mind again from Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (obviously, my favorite book of the summer). Somewhere in the neighborhood of page 29, Scarry makes the argument that beauty is so important for living well and with justice because beauty gives us the experience of being wrong and liking it. Natural beauty can do this same thing: cause us to realize that we’ve been profoundly wrong about life. When we stand in the wilderness of nature, we get to choose again whether we will be alive in person or by proxy – whether we will exist for the sake of our technology, or whether we will use it rightly in the service of others and the blessing of the earth. Koyaanistqatsi stands out to me so much because it brings me into contact with a different pace and horizon of life – the fast, the massive, the insane: these are all more so in this film, a hyper-reality of experience. But because of beauty, I desire this challenge instead of running from it in fear and escapism.
The whole movie has been posted to Youtube, but I don’t at all recommend watching it on any less than a large screen. Besides, product placement does not mix well with this film.
I’ve started to pay more attention to things Kevin Kelly is writing, especially on the “non-neutrality” of technology. His Technium is going to be a very important piece as we consider the issue of alternative futures and the imaginative visions driving those possible directions (in fact, the Technium project seems to be Kelly’s direct response to Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near). The post that I’ve just been reading today is “Triumph of the Default” (June 22, 2009). Kelly is commenting on the hidden influence on users’ experience of technology as it comes from its makers loaded with biases and presumed ideals. I quote the posting at length here:
Systems are not neutral. They have natural biases. We tame the cascading choices we gain from accelerating technology by introducing small nudges — by deliberating embedding our own biases (also called a default) into the system here and there. We wield biases within inevitable technologies to aim them towards our common goals — increasing diversity, complexity, specialization, sentience, and beauty.
Defaults also remind us of another truth. By definition a default works when we — the user or consumer or citizen — do nothing. But doing nothing is not neutral, since it triggers a default bias. That means that “no choice” is a choice itself. There’s is no neutral, even, or especially, in non action. Despite the claims of many, technology is never neutral. Even when you don’t choose what to do with it, it chooses. A system acquires a definite drift and clear momentum from those inherent biases, whether or not we act upon them. The best we can do is nudge it.
I think it becomes obvious that our “defaults” as producers and artists – while not controlling the use or interpretation of our work – definitely carry implications to audiences. We want people to take it a certain way, even if that certain way is “to keep an open mind and not assume it only has one meaning.” This is one of many ways in which the presentation space – physical, acoustic, visual, etc. – profoundly influences audience experiences. Think of the difference between taking in a movie passively on a small laptop screen while simultaneously facebooking/twittering/youtubing around and actually taking the trek downtown to that little theater that plays the independent films on a huge screen with warm projected light beaming through always high-resolution analog film (thanks to Read Schuchardt from his thoughts on this topic). Each format “wants” something different from you – and your behavior as a viewer trends toward that demand, even or especially through inaction (as Kelly points out, on a more general basis). This relates directly to whether we will use technology as it is handed to us, or make something else out of it – whether we will shape the tool, or be shaped by it.
For more from Kevin Kelly, watch his TED talk from several years back on the evolution of technology:
Sometimes I’ll see something being done in immersive media and think, “Oh, that’s kinda cool. Too bad it’s completely dumb too.” (The 3D Log Ride Adventure comes back to haunt me with its sheer inanity). Nothing could be further from my mind when I read about companies like San Francisco’s Obscura Digital. Fast Company has an excellent article that conveys not only the envelope-pushing technical creativity of Obscura, but also the personality and artistic ethos of (what sounds like) a great place to build amazing things.
Exploring Obscura’s work is a great way to start visualizing some of the possible visual art space possibilities of the Cube. Their image- and video-wrapping technologies mirror those of some other creators we’ve come across (like Zach Booth Simpson), but their marketing work positions them to push forward immersive visual spaces into the public imagination.
Remember the much-anticipated experience of stepping into a planetarium to watch the mysteries of the universe unfold with the rest of your whole 4th grade class? If that was in the 80s (as it was for me), the harsh reality of an underwhelming stumble through a second-rate animated solar system probably shook your astronautical aspirations to their fragile core. Well, it’s the 00s (?) and planetariums are movin’ on up. Maximum PC has an article about a good one, the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco (which, coincidentally, recently underwent a remodel from notable architect Renzo Piano).
In imagining the Cube, it’s hard not to think of this type of visual experience (the space travel one). Perhaps of most relevance, the CAS project shows that digital rendering and display technology keeps on moving in the right direction (for us anyway).
These ten were distinguished as the best from the three most recent TED conferences. There are two that are intriguing to me: the Seadragon/Photosynth demo by Blaise Aguera y Arcas and the touchscreen demo from Jeff Han (blogged here).
What I like so much about the Photosynth idea is its involvement of the personal contributor in a meaningful grand project (utilizing the Web 2.0 user value-added dynamic which is becoming more typical as the web ages away from anarchy and toward connectivity). I also saw this Photosynth stuff mentioned in a recent Wall Street Journal article (08.21.08, by Walter Mossberg) when I was waiting around in my bank the other day. The online version of Photosynth is there to be played with, but there is still some foibles to be shaken out, such as not having completely “synthy” photos – ones that for whatever reason don’t entirely work with the 3D walk-through system.
