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Tomorrow's world : regards
vers le futur
Leo Benedictus, journaliste pour le quotidien anglais The
Guardian réunissait, en juillet dernier, un groupe
d’artistes pour réfléchir et spéculer
sur l’art du futur. Quels seront les impacts des nouvelles
technologies sur les pratiques artistiques de demain ?
Emotional houses, robot dance teachers
and 3D TV - is this how technology will transform the arts?
Leo Benedictus asks a panel of experts to gaze into their
virtual crystal balls
Technical revolutions happen so often in the arts these
days that we scarcely seem to notice them. Singers' voices
are now routinely refined with computers to create more
polished pop, which can then be analysed by software such
as Music Science or HSS to determine whether or not it's
a hit. Cinema audiences now take it for granted that great
tracts of their favourite films were not actually filmed
at all, but generated with baffling geometry inside microchips.
Photographers' lives have been transformed by the advent
of digital cameras - but then everyone with a mobile phone
is a photographer now, and often a film-maker, too. Some
painters might stick resolutely to oils on canvas, but they
know their work can now be seen and bought online by anybody
in the world who cares to look. It can be hard to remember
what the world was like 15 years ago when none of this was
true, and harder still to imagine what art will be like
in 15 years' time. Which is why we assembled our expert
panel to imagine it for us.
Ironically, if there was a single point that drew broad
agreement from everyone, it was that artists should think
less about technology. There was a shared perception that
the exciting novelty of new gadgets makes them harder to
use in a meaningful way. "Technology is a way of arriving,"
said architect Amanda Levete, "and it's not right to
justify something purely in terms of the way it was made
or arrived at. I think that's banal and obscures the meaning
of the thing." The artist Bill Viola suggested that
"our age will be looked on as the self-conscious technology
age".
But futurologist Robin Mannings thought this novelty would
soon wear off. It won't be new inventions that revolutionise
the arts over the next decade, he believes, so much as the
fact that existing ones will become much cheaper and more
widespread - and that when this happens, everyone will start
to ignore them. "My feeling," he said, "is
that pretty much everything we have of any value at all
- the clothes we wear, the food we eat, certainly the buildings,
the furniture, everything - will have the ability to communicate,
the ability to sense and the ability to think. That's going
to lead not just to a reappraisal of how we experience traditional
art, but also to artistic activity and emotional experiences
that we can only scratch the surface of today."
The current pace of change is such that Jude Kelly, artistic
director of the South Bank and chair of the Arts, Culture
and Education committee for the 2012 Olympics, received
a sceptical response to her mention, in a paper she prepared
for the Olympic bid two years ago, that visitors to the
games would be making films of the experience and swapping
them with one another. "People were saying, 'That sounds
too futuristic,'" she recalled. "Now they're not
saying that."
With almost every art form becoming cheaper and easier both
to produce and distribute, the panel also expected that,
in years to come, many millions more people will be making
their own art - indeed, most said they have noticed this
happening already. On the whole, this process of democratisation
was felt to be a very positive thing, even if it adds more
bad art than good to the world's supply.
Ekow Eshun, artistic director of the Institute for Contemporary
Arts in London, pointed out that, even if we could predict
what new technology would be developed over the next 10
years, it doesn't mean we know what artists will do with
it. He quoted the novelist William Gibson: "The street
finds its own use for things." Viola told the story
of Robert Rauschenberg's college oil painting: "One
day he came back and his canvas had fallen over. He picked
it up and it was completely littered with pebbles and grass
and stuff. A mediocre artist would pick that thing up and
go, 'Oh no, it's ruined. Damn!' Robert Rauschenberg said,
'Cool!'"
There was a feeling that social change will transform art
far more than technology alone. And with video tattoos and
orgasm by email just a decade or so away (according to BT's
futurology team), we should get ready for society to change
quite a bit. The need to reduce energy consumption, too,
is expected to place a premium on art that can be experienced
without having to travel - even though everyone agreed that
this could never be a substitute for actually being there.
Eventually, Mannings promised, this might be accomplished
by using devices that can implant sounds and images directly
into the brain, stimulating our senses of touch, taste and
smell - technologies that might one day become new art forms
in themselves.
Future imperfect
Ekow Eshun - Technology is bent towards
perfection, towards making the best possible thing. Art,
though, is interested in imperfection, in the spaces in
between things. It's a battle against banality. Since the
advent of CGI, there have been some appalling films made
in Hollywood - hugely sophisticated, hugely expensive, but
genuinely appalling - because the technology has been allowed
to run away with itself. Hence the new Star Wars films,
King Kong etc. Everything looks flat. There is no depth
or imperfection.
Jude Kelly - It's the quality of the thought
that's really important in art. People who have learned
to earn their living by art investigate the best and most
profound ways of dealing with technology and meaning. I'm
sure that investigation is as important to us as, say, nanotechnology
is to the prosthetics of the future.
Bill Viola - I've been working on a 3D
virtual-world project for a while. We were looking at some
models of spaces and how you move through them, and it occurred
to me, after seeing countless demos, that there was not
a speck of dirt anywhere. You'd walk through and you didn't
leave footprints. I wanted to have dirt in my world, but
the guy said: "We don't have enough memory for that."
Amanda Levete - There's a big danger in
technology releasing us to create any form that we want.
Unless you attach meaning to it, it's nothing. What I see
in the people who work in my office - who are a different
generation, trained in a different way, to draw on a computer,
not with a pencil or employing physical model-making - is
a tendency to rely on the computer. This generates stunning
images, which are very beguiling but completely deceitful.
And because of the technology used to produce these drawings
there's always an absence of people, and that prevents them
from asking the question: who is this building for, and
why is it here? It's just form-making without meaning. I
do feel terribly Luddite, but I encourage people in my office
- or force them - to use a pencil, to start making models
in Plasticine and balsawood, and get their hands dirty.
It's the only way you can understand what you're doing.
Otherwise, you're letting the computer run away with itself
into a world of fantasy.
We're all artists now
Robin Mannings - In the past, artistic
activities have been pretty much the preserve of the leaders,
the rich, the powerful - not necessarily the slaves who
were building the pyramid, but the pharaoh who ordered it
built. New technology is changing that.
BV - Human beings have always been creative.
The guys who were making the pyramids - and archaeological
research has showed us this - had little figurines made
by the workers, to express their devotion to their god.
EE - So many of the things that have been
inspirational for me over the past couple of decades, from
pop art, to hip-hop to punk, have been works where the whole
point was to look at them and say: "I can do that."
BV - When I started in video I was one
of two or three dozen video artists in 1970. And now, to
paraphrase Andy Warhol, everyone's a video artist. Video,
through your cellphone and camcorder, has become a form
of speech, and speech is not James Joyce. It's great, and
to be celebrated, but it has to find its own level.
AL - We don't need to get too vexed about
what is or isn't art, however, because you can kind of tell.
If you look back at art and architecture, there's an incredible
consensus about what are the great works. There's an invisible
filter that operates.
EE - My editor at Penguin likes to say
that everyone has a book in them, but most of those books
don't deserve to be published. It's like that with most
creative endeavour. We are commissioning a new website for
the ICA, and one of the most important aspects of it when
it goes live in a couple of months will be user-generated
content. Less than the minutest fraction of that will be
genius, but the whole point is what happens when you open
it up - I don't know what we'll find.
BV - Technology's not going to change the
number of geniuses in the world, but there has been a whole
middle zone of quite talented people who don't have that
superhuman gift. Some of the lounge pianists I've heard
are pretty good. They're not going to play Carnegie Hall,
but they're pretty good.
The world is my audience
BV - The revolution is in distribution.
I can go home right now, shoot something on my camcorder,
push a button and it can be seen in Angola.
RM - Where things happen no longer matters.
If an activity now happens in a London gallery, there is
no reason why pretty much anyone on Earth can't experience
that in real time without having to travel.
AL - But it's not ever the same, because
of the difference between going to a gallery to see a painting
and buying a postcard of it. The experience isn't anything
like as deep and meaningful as when you got to the real
thing.
RM - Well, I'm delighted to be physically
present at this table in the centre of London, but I've
burned a lot of fossil fuel getting here. In the future
there are going to be some real problems that we're going
to have to solve, and one of the solutions is going to be
to use travel substitution.
I agree it's not the same, but I think it's a moot point
whether it's necessarily going to be worse. All we need
are better-quality media. At the moment the resolution of
a TV picture is pretty poor. You can't communicate very
good quality sound down the telephone system yet, but you
will. And what about smell, or feeling the draft, or sensing
that something's going on around the corner? The challenge
to the artists of the world will be to embrace the toolkit
and start to explore ways of making meaningful new experiences.
Don't forget climate change
RM - The biggest determinant of our future
is going to be about climate change, energy conservation
and so on. Is it actually going to be moral to create buildings
that just look nice, when our objectives should be to create
buildings that fit in sustainably? Maybe the answer could
be a building made out of biodegradable material, back to
wattle and daub, or straw? Possibly the best thing to do
with buildings is to bury them. If something is underground
it probably doesn't need so much heating or cooling. It's
also safe - although maybe flooding's a problem.
AL - It's not enough to make something
beautiful in architecture, and that's what separates it
from art. Which is not to say that I don't believe architecture
is an art, because I do, but it's different. What separates
the two is function, and responding to environmental issues
is part of the function of a building. However, I don't
think that environmental concerns should be the only driver,
because you do end up with boring and worthy buildings;
you have to invest it with other layers of meaning beyond
that.
Who needs technology anyway?
RM - Computing and communications are getting
so cheap that today's PlayStations will one day be given
away with pencil cases. Technology will become invisible,
because we'll just take it for granted. When electric light
was invented, theatres were called "electric theatres",
because electricity was the new thing. Now electricity is
so ubiquitous we ignore it.
BV - And yet technology has seeped into
the social space - primarily into the spaces when you're
alone. There's always a voice chattering away: the radio's
on, the TV's on, people are talking on their cellphone.
It's come in and reached us at our most individual private
moment, which is one-on-one.
JK - I'm quite glad that I don't have to
go to bed early every night, as in the days before electricity.
On the other hand, if I had to choose between candles and
electricity, I'd choose candles. It's quieter and more still
- even though it's flickering - and something that takes
you nearer to the self, which is one of the issues about
all technology.
EE - A candle is more interesting than
a light bulb because it offers its own shades and meanings;
it leaves you space to write in your own meanings.
Invisibility is the key. I tend to think that things are
only interesting once they become useful enough for you
not to have to think about how to use them. When technology
stops being a thing, and starts becoming something you can
mess up and write your own versions of, that's when it becomes
more interesting.
Un article de Leo Benedictus, paru dans l'édition
du 12 juillet 2006 du quotidien The Guardian.
Source :
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/
Retourner
au sommaire de septembre 2006
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auteurs et pas nécessairement celle du RQD.
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