Art and Creativity Unleashed.
The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past. Edition 197.
Art is technology infused with human creativity.
And as technology relentlessly advances the possibilities of art, artists and those that interact and participate with art are greater than ever.
It is no longer a fission of left brain (science) versus right brain (art) but their fusion that will be the future.
From the earliest discoveries of fire to modern computing devices and cloud-based software, humans have bent and leveraged technology in creative ways to express themselves and connect with each other and the wider world.
Fire did not just keep us warm, enabled the cooking of food and forging of new tools but it also let people turn clay into hardened ceramic pots and vases, useful for carrying and storing food, water, or other items which were then shaped and decorated in ways beyond their functional use.
Today like never before technology is enabling artistic and creative endeavors by a) fueling new art forms, b) enabling far more people with a variety of tools to express themselves creatively and c) scaling the ability to share, display and connect with potential audiences and patrons.
1.Photography
Today photographs are the most widely created and distributed art form.
They have been turbocharged by camera phones bursting with mega pixels and magical software. The ensuing images are then scaled and distributed via social media feeds algorithmically optimized to maximize engagement.
And modern AI technology now allows for photos to be imagined without being taken and for photos taken to be reimagined in ways that never existed when the photograph was taken.
A long way from Ansel Adams and the stationary bulky camera but also a significant distance from a portable film Leica used by the great photojournalists and creative photographers in the latter half of the 20th Century.
Some folks pine for the days of old.
They need not pine since they can use a medium or very large format camera loaded with black and white film and wait for the ideal moment. But their efforts will pale in comparison to someone using a modern digital Leica Q3 or M11 or even an iPhone15 Pro Max and then tuning the result in Adobe Lightroom with Firefly enabled.
The aforementioned Ansel Adams himself spent hours optimizing photographs in the dark room and were he alive today would probably be an expert at leveraging AI.
While technology enables the possibility and potential of artists it does not necessarily make an artist. Similarly, the refusal to leverage modern possibilities and hold to traditional ways does not cause one to be a more “genuine artist”.
2. Film
It is in film industry that we often encounter the battle between “the way it was and should be” be versus the future.
Not only is the movie theater increasingly a container of the past but the two-to-three- hour film itself is just one way of modern film expression.
A case can be made that in today’s streaming eco-system artists working in film have far greater ways of expressing and creating their art then when they were limited to movie and television studios of the past. Why be constrained to three hours when the better idea maybe a series (Queens Gambit was originally a movie idea)? Why be limited to what can fit in the few theaters or is curated by some mysterious coven of coastal “taste makers” when a world of possibilities can be sampled and global audiences reached via a Netflix, Acorn, Mubi, Criterion, MzH and much more?
Look at the list of popular films on Netflix and so many come from Asia and Latin America.
The ability to determine how to release (weekly, all at one time, in phases) one’s work, the global scale of audiences reached, the creative freedom and new economic possibilities have made streaming television the new high art form of film versus the movies.
Most theatrical movies are now commercials for the eco-system of spinoffs and merchandise that follows. And many of the truly artistic films which may be more edgy, risky and artistic movies from Roma to The Irishman to One Night in Miami are now funded and launched by the streaming channels. They are not crushing but unleashing creativity like never before on a global scale.
A reason “The Mandalorian” on Disney+ has resonated so well is the fact that it has the space to build its world and story versus being Star Wars 10: The Emergence of Yoda. And with modern Unreal Engine 5 technology and its cylinders we can get visual effects far more real than green screen.
With larger and cheaper OLED screens, audio spatial software bringing surround sound to headphones and improvements in discovery, every technology advance in film is taking place in personal and home viewing spaces.
If you have not spent time with Apple Vision Pro (now rolling out globally) you must get a 30 minute free demo and ask to see the Alicia Keyes rehearsal and see some spatial photography. Apple has unleashed the future of film and video and a far finer theater than one that exists in the real world. Watching Avatar in 3D on a Vision Pro is an incredible experience. Spatial computing and everything else that Tim Cook promised will come but the future of content consumption is here (but currently very expensive and very individualized).
3. Music
While there is a recent resurgence in vinyl among the diehard aficionados the future of music is streaming and increasingly integrated with video whether it be on TikTok or YouTube or the streaming platforms.
Most of joy of vinyl is in the ritual rather than the result. There is a certain joy in placing vinyl on a turntable, perusing the liner notes and accompanying art that the physical format enables. Then there is the romanticizing of the crackling hiss of mechanical impurity brought to life by the scratches that is all about a memory and a story. A memory and story separate from the “warmth” of the music that only vinyl can supposedly re-create.
The great American audio gear firm, McIntosh, with its old-fashioned transistor quality has seen the future and has been releasing their wonderful gear with its glowing green dials optimized for headphones connected to digital music.
Streaming music via Tidal (much higher quality than Spotify), with a great pair of headphones and digital amp is absolutely stunning as is Spatial Audio on Apple.
The benefits of streaming not only include the convenience, catalog depth and curation (both software enabled and curated by other subscribers) but increasingly the curation and community provided by artists and emerging artists.
Bandcamp and Soundcloud are two excellent sources for a different independent and less commercial take on music than those of Spotify and Apple Music.
The other area of great advance in music is in automobiles. Today it is very likely that the best sound system most people have is in their cars. The major audio companies now combine hardware and software design working in tandem with the auto manufacturers as the cars are being designed (McIntosh has partnered with Jeep). The new Mercedes S Class has speakers in seats that vibrate to music at certain software settings to create a 4 D sound experience!
To understand the power of how modern technology can unleash and enable music check out Digital Concert Hall of the Berlin Philharmonic which among other things has one of the best user interfaces and discovery engines I have interacted with. Any company waxing poetic about “Brand Experiences” should check them out (unfortunately most of the functionality requires a subscription which I would highly recommend even if for just a month to truly understand what is possible)
What makes the Digital Concert Hall amazing is that when the new physical orchestra hall was constructed in Berlin it was built not just to optimize sound for the live audience but to record high quality audio and video from multiple angles for home subscribers and streaming audiences. As a result, you feel you are sitting in the orchestra and watching and hearing the music in ways that enable a new level of appreciation.
They built and anticipated for a global and digital and a new demographic future where the next generation of concert subscribers might wish to engage on demand from home and that home maybe in Japan or India and not in Berlin.
Because of their foresight, the Berlin Philharmonic continues to perform all through the challenges of Covid-19 for the world and their subscribers even though they are playing to an empty orchestra hall.
And for the aspiring Mozarts and Dylan’s of the world there are new ways to learn instruments and much more. For instance to understand the depth of what is possible if you wish to learn (or teach) guitar take a look at Truefire Studios.
4. The Written Word
Before photography, film and recorded music came the word and its most popular containers the broadsheet newspaper and the bound book. Both remain with one (the physical newspaper) in deep decline while the other (physical book) continues to grow and prosper.
A case can be made that two of the greatest works of art every created were conceived nearly 500 years ago in the 17th century. The first and possibly still the greatest novel ever Don Quixote and the greatest play ever William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Almost everything since is a variation and combination of these two classics.
The broadsheet after being continuously diminished in its size and heft has been increasingly replaced by its digital manifestation while the book has been complemented rather than be replaced by its audible and electronic representations.
Why has the vinyl of reading, the humble book, continued to grow? Is it because the form allows for disconnection so one can immerse in a world of imagination and the focus of deep learning? Or is the ability to underline sentences and scribble in the margins arguing or agreeing with the author something difficult to replicate in a digital format? Or is it that when you are reading a book in many cases you are both everywhere and nowhere and the silence of print is particularly enabling to this reverie? Or it just might be books make great artifacts to decorate a room or office or signal learnedness and taste?
While the book prospers the written word has also burst out its containers of the past with new formats including blogging platforms like Wordpress and Medium or newsletter publishing from Substack, Beehiv, Ghost and others.
Here are some statistics about Substack:
As of March 2024, Substack has more than 20 million monthly active subscribers, including 2 million paid subscribers.It received 122.59 million visits, with an average session duration of 9:07 and the top 10 authors on Substack in combination make $25 million per year.
These new forms of writing, reaching and monetizing an audience are some of the on ramps for emerging talent and off ramps for established talent to and from the world of newspapers, magazines and books.
5. Museums.
The world’s greatest Museums are no longer in Paris, New York, Chicago, London or Florence. They are in the Cloud and probably best portal into the amazing world is Google Art and Culture Page (Openculture.org is another great portal)
Here, the full power of modern technology to support, promote and celebrate art and culture is in full display. Walk through museums, get microscopic looks in high definition to a small part of a painting, rotate and move sculptures and much more.
Travel across the world doing deep dives into the landscapes outside museums, the interiors of the museum and all the art that lives there.
Yes, they do not replace a visit to a museum.
They may have surpassed the museum!
And for most of the world it will be the only way they get to a museum.
On Apple Vision Pro there are some great art apps and one can just imagine the child of a marriage between Vision Pro and Google Art will birth regarding the museum experience.
6. Mongrel Media.
Digital is like hydrochloric acid.
It burns through constraining containers.
This is true in business and art.
Today the state of the art of what technology can do to unleash creativity is Unreal Engine 5 ( see the demos above) which drives the latest games, immersive experiences and enables some of miracle of cinema.
But all media is melting and morphing into a melee of multi-media and multi-channel munificence.
Podcasts:Take the intimacy of the written word and marry it with digital sound and the access of cloud-based delivery and you have a wonderful recent form called the podcast. Now quite a few have a video feed.
TikTok: Take modern AI, the ubiquity of the mobile phone and combine it with the creativity of people and you have a fast growing, highly addictive, new content form called TikTok.
New York Times Digital: Take world class journalists and photographers and combine them with digital artists, software experts and remove the constraint of space or being limited to the printed word or even the news ( Wordle anyone?) and you have New York Times Digital.
Gaming: Take hardware, software, film, music and story telling and fuse them and you get the nearly 500 billion dollar global gaming industry which is larger than the film, music and publishing businesses combined. Starting on low powered consoles it has spread to hand held consoles, cloud based delivery, mobile phones, consoles with the power of super computers and much more.
If you want to see the most amazing future of advertising, content and AI check out what Microsoft is planning and unleashing in the gaming world. Gaming is where all the top technologies from Unreal Engine to AI to Metaverse to Blockchain are being optimized. Brands who are not paying deep attention to the gaming ecosystem should.
And it will not just be Microsoft but many other firms including Meta which has a lot up its sleeve and the potential of gaming is why Disney spent 1.5 billion dollars to purchase a small stake in Epic the owner of Unreal Engine.
The future does not fit in the containers of the past.
The pipes to the future are laid by modern hardware and software plumbing.
But it is the human connections and art and meaning that this plumbing enables that makes life worth living.
Let us not fixate so much on the plumbing that we forget the poetry.
Let us not call for the good old days when the best time for creativity is now.
We are the most wonderful age for creativity and artists and the commercial that Apple released for the new iPad should be viewed in reverse. Technology unleashing the Arts rather than Technology crushing the Arts. See the better version here:
May 23, 2024
© 2024 The Continuum
