The future of art may not be canvas and clay, but ones and zeros. What does the future of technology tell us about the future and practice of art?

Adam Greenfield’s book Radical Technologies  (Published by Verso Books)  is one of the best books I’ve read this year on the relationship between art, technology, and their impact. The text is a strong and forceful critique against the hero worship of figures like Elon Musk, the idea that technology is naturally a force for good, and the notion that everything (including art) is improved as it becomes more advanced.

Adam has lived in both Japan and Korea, and was kind enough to speak with Asia Art Tours about Art, Technology, and the future.

I hope you enjoy!

-Matt DM, founder of Asia Art Tours

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Asia Art Tours:  Japan is host to numerous art forms whose masters are literally dying off, with no apprentices under them to carry on the art form. After reading about the Bushido Project, I’m wondering if you see projects like this as a way to archive and save art forms before the masters (and their knowledge) literally die. As with the Bushido project, could (and should) we apply this technique to other art forms such as calligraphy, Ikebane or ceramics?

 

Adam Greenfield: It’s not my place to say, not having mastered any of those forms. But my gut tells me that from the senior practitioner’s perspective, the answer will depend very much on how they perceive their chosen domain of endeavor. In martial arts terms, do they think of themselves as practicing a 道 or a 術?

Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t imagine the practioners of an “art” particularly minding if their methods are abstracted and represented as machinic instructions, especially if in pragmatic terms it means the survival of their art and the continuing relevance of their contributions to it. But I do, very much, anticipate resistance on the part of those who conceive of what they do as a “way,” as a spiritual practice.

The possible exception, I suppose, would be those masters who share the perspective of the Heart Sutra — that is, that there is no subject of a spiritual practice, properly understood, and therefore that any possible distinction between human and posthuman sentiences enacting it is invidious.

 

AAT:  Everyday I read about Tech moguls being obsessed with emotional spaces like Burning Man, LSD usage,  “cuddle orgies”  or whatever the hell you’d call this trend from the New York Times.

Why do tech workers (or perhaps just moguls) build “machines” and systems that tag, categorize and segregate reality but celebrate hedonism and unstructured creativity in their personal lives? Why do they want freedom and lack of structure in their own lives, but abhor this in the systems they build?

 

AG: I have two answers, one perhaps kinder than the other.

The straightforward, if unkind, way of answering is to observe that a great many of the figures at the heart of our present technosocial revolution grew up fairly nerdy, with everything that then implied about self-esteem and social confidence. They may, indeed, have been drawn to technology because it presented itself to them as a realm governed by reason, logic and order, in sharp contrast to the fickle, unpredictable, unjust world of social interaction. But now that they’ve acquired a little capital, worldly power and recognition, and the self-confidence that goes hand-in-hand with them, they find that they’re better able to manage the pressures of the social world. They want to explore all the possibilities that have opened up for them, and most particularly the access to sensual pleasure they’re newly afforded.

And this can express itself with an almighty vengeance at SxSW, or still more so Burning Man. Everybody goes a little nuts their first time at an event like that, especially if they experience it for the first time as an adult, and nothing in their previous life has prepared them for it. I think what you’re seeing is simply what happens, predictably enough, when you combine temporal power, long banked-up desire and sudden disinhibition. The New Age trappings are just window dressing, scene-setting or priming for what they really want to do, which is Get Down.

A more charitable way of answering, though, is to point out that digital systems are still founded on a binary logic that both requires precision in its inputs and renders it in its productions. That logic renders reality in discrete intervals, which is astonishingly effective as a way of ordering the world so its contents can be instrumentalized or operationalized, but is pretty limiting as a mode of being. The world, by contrast, is continuous, or at least quantized at a level many, many orders of magnitude beneath our ability to perceive it. So looked at through a different, more generous lens, what your tech moguls are doing when they take a few hits of ecstasy and dissolve into a cuddle puddle on the floor of a friend’s loft is redressing an imbalance in their lives that they may or may not be consciously aware of. Seen this way, they’re giving themselves over to a rich, continuously variable reality of sensation and flow, precisely because their everyday experiences deprive them of such opportunities.

The truth, of course, is that very very few people in technology are close enough to the code for it to order their perceptions in any meaningful way. So my money’s on the former explanation.

 

Jaron Lanier (a big fan of music and art) among others has long praised VR as a potential for greater human connectivity and creativity…. giving people a virtual play space to create and connect.  

I am wondering if you see this same potential? Is creativity and connection  possible if these VR platforms are owned by monopolistic concerns as they are now?

 

 Well, I personally wouldn’t look to Jaron Lanier for coherent thought about much of anything, and I think this is a great example of his shallowness.

The notion that virtual environments might foster a form of creativity is something I don’t actually have that much of a problem with. I mean, there’s plenty of precedent: there are any number of clever ways in which people have used the relatively limited expressive palette offered to them by something like Minecraft to generate something that speaks to them. An even more apposite example might be Second Life — as embarrassing and dated as it now seems to most of us, there are people who have spent literally months if not years of their lives in that environment, crafting objects and spaces that evidently communicate something intensely important to them. It doesn’t speak to me, but it seems foolish to argue that what they’re doing isn’t creative in some way.

But connection is a harder sell, and there I draw the line. Interpersonal relations in a virtual space are always and by definition going to be mediated through a sharply impoverished and heavily stylized subset of the communicative channels embodiment offers us. Anyone who thinks that’s “connection” is selling genuine physioemotional copresence pretty short, and in fact I’m moved to suspect that someone pressing that argument with vigor may never have fully experienced what it is to be emotionally present, vulnerable and available to another.

Most seriously of all, we already have a space in which to create and connect. It costs nothing, is owned by nobody, has no technical specifications, doesn’t require upgrades or ingame purchases or DLC to use effectively, and doesn’t go away when the power is cut off. We call it “reality,” and we undervalue it at our peril.

 

One of arts great functions for the wealthy is that it occupies space, and by occupying space it occupies mind. Art hung on a mansion’s barren wall brings meaning that otherwise would make one question the purpose of their wealth and status.

I’m wondering if art becomes non-physical  (i.e. teamLab’s “digital museum”) or if art is produced by algorithm (non-human actors) how will the wealthy adjust?  Will they be willing to support non-human created art that doesn’t occupy physical space (digital)?

 

That’s an interesting take, and I want to consider it further. My own observation is that the wealthy people I know very rarely spend any time in actual contemplation of the artwork they’ve collected. Once an artwork has served its dual functions of accumulating social capital and, well, capital-capital, it’s wallpaper, something that’s precisely not in mind. Perhaps they have occasion to contemplate a piece for a few seconds every time they get to show it off to new visitors, but for the most part it’s just there…appreciating but not appreciated.

But to your point, yeah, I just don’t see the wealthy broadly underwriting work that doesn’t support what we might call its Veblen functions — not unless it somehow redounds to their benefit socially. And what that implies for expressive media that can’t be tangibly consumed is, as far as I’m concerned, fantastic. It means that people who are there for the wrong reasons, for motivations other than those of sincere curiosity and excitement, just tend to evaporate and to bunk off to scenes where their desire for social affirmation is more straightforwardly rewarded.

The risk for any scene like that then becomes insularity and obscurity and self-referential preciousness, but that’s nothing particularly novel for niche creative communities the world over.

 

 Regarding the Next Rembrandt project, do you anticipate entirely original artwork will soon be created completely by algorithms? And if so, how would its aesthetic merits be evaluated?

For creative endeavors will we soon have digital critic algorithms critiquing (and rating and categorizing in recommendation engines) films/pieces of art produced by other algorithms?

 

 I think we can approach an answer, albeit in kind of a crabwise manner, by considering a closely parallel question. I often argue that the true achievement of synthetic intelligence will lie not in defeating the highest-ranked human player of chess or go, but in devising a game as captivating as chess or go in the first place.

That, to me, is the test. By this standard, I don’t believe we can truly consider algorithmic systems capable of creativity until they’re generating expressive works that correspond somehow to their unique experience of the world. Not simply generating bizarre forms or sounds or images, that is, à la DeepDream, but producing forms and sounds and images that reflect aesthetic choice, that are structured specifically to express something, however ineffable. And I don’t think we’re there just yet, we may not get there for some time yet to come, and may indeed never quite get there at all.

There is always the possibility, of course, that we will simply not recognize this achievement if and when it does happen — that creative machinic systems will make their aesthetic choices in a medium, at a spatial scale or subject to a temporality which is beneath or beyond the threshold of human perception. What if the highest form of machinic creativity is manipulating material, social or geological dynamics to produce patterns in space and time that are somehow pleasing to the systems involved, that we don’t even recognize as the product of volition? There may well be genres of art that we’re not even capable of perceiving, let alone participating in.

As to whether other machinic systems will, in turn, evaluate those works of art, that would seem to suggest a coherent set of criteria for doing so, articulated by an agent that shares at least some subjectivity with the creator. And again, I just don’t think we know enough about the nature of emergent machinic intelligence to say whether or not such evaluations would arise unprompted. It’s hard for me, at least, to imagine why posthuman systems, acting purely amongst themselves, would feel the need to produce a structured set of discursive acts that fill the same role art criticism serves in human societies, but maybe that says more about the limits of my imagination than it does anything else.

 

Asia Art Tours: Lastly, of all the subjects addressed in Radical Technologies, which do you see as potentially of the most use or of the most utility to future artists?

Adam Greenfield: I mean, they’re almost all of them expressive media, they almost all support an aesthetics and a poetics…but I have to confess I’m personally really excited to see where precision digital fabrication goes. I think we’ll see some pretty subtle, potent objects arise out of that, whether formally devised via algorithm or by the human hand and heart.


Adam Greenfield, founder and managing director of Urbanscale, is a passionate advocate for the human-centered design of technological systems.

Between 2008 and 2010, he was Nokia’s head of design direction for service and user interface design; earlier in the decade, he had worked as lead information architect for the Tokyo office of Internet consultancy Razorfish.

Adam has spoken before South by Southwest Interactive, LIFT (and LIFT Asia), PICNIC, Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers, the MIT Media Lab, the Royal Society of London, and a very wide variety of other citizen, professional, corporate, academic and governmental audiences worldwide.

He has lived and worked in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Finland, Korea and Japan. Endmark

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