Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration Between Science, Technology and Art

 

I do like this kind of book that attempts to sum up a moment in cultural time, especially when the author is also rash enough to predict the future. 

Firstly because when done well they make for a snapshot-in-time that sweeps across the state of the art. These documents are true labours of love for their probably not well recompensed authors. C.f. obsolete reference books and encyclopedias.

But this kind of a book usually acquires a certain aura of pathos, because as time goes by, the newness they are documenting becomes oldness. What's that thing people say, nothing dates faster than the new? 

Indeed, quite often - especially in very fast-moving times - by the time the book gets published, a year or more after being finished, things have moved on.

The book attempts to make a beach head in the future, to map out what is going to happen next - but a whole bunch of things that didn't and couldn't have been foreseen happen instead. 

(This almost always happens with music books, at least those that are 'big statement / where we're at, where things are going' type music books. It's hard to think one that isn't swiftly outdated, as the protean onrush of music culture makes its wayward way, usually involving swerves off track or double-backs.  This applies to my own books as much as anybody's. Notable shortfalls on the prophetic front include Nik Cohn's Awopbopaloobop and Tony Palmer's All You Need Is Love. Published in January 1976, the latter - a history of pop so far - features a closing chapter that imagines pop becoming either more theatrical and showbizzy or more like classical music (long instrumental works). These predictions are based on the fact that he's wrapping up the writing in early 1975 at the very latest, so he's taking his bearings from things like Alice Cooper's Broadway-style TV special and the huge success of Tubular Bells. He's got no idea that punk and disco as a mass phenomenon are round the corner - how could he?)

With the Douglas Davis tome, published in 1973, the pathos is intensified because in its pages we are confronted with a foregone futurism, a prematurely abandoned frontier. 

The book pulses with excitement about the late 1960s interface between art and technology, as manifested in trends like Kinetic Art, early computer art, video art and experimental television, and all kinds of work involving plastics and neon light and electronics and holograms.  Artists becoming more like engineers, the mise en scene of creativity closer to a laboratory than the garret with the starving artist in a smock speckled in paint and facing the empty canvas. 

There are parallels between this once-cutting-edge stuff and other very lost-to-time things like geodesic domes and Archigram-style speculative architecture (impossible buildings, urban planning that is pure fantasy, mobile cities etc etc). 

There's also critical chatter from the likes of Susan Sontag about a new kind of art that is about the programming of sensations -  art that is experiential, something felt,  undergone rather than understood. "Against Interpretation", "One Culture and the New Sensibility", "Happenings". etc. 

Dougie has no idea that other things - performance art, body art, land art - are coming down the pike. Let alone a resurgence of figurative painting. 

This book catches the cresting peak of post-WW2 second-wave / second-wind modernism, just before the plummet into pomo. 

Of course, you still get plenty of artists today who are trying to do work using new technology, new materials.  

Currently with AI.... in recent decades, all things digital and internetty...  selfies and search engines...  

But the stuff done in the Sixties has almost an steampunk quaintness - it's so electro-mechanical.  

It's like the difference between bursting-with-wires modular synths (analogue hardware) and computers (digital software) 

There’s an intersection with the Creel Pone realm  - Kinetic sculptor Nicolas Schöffer made one album of  electrono-drones that are ironically (and mesmerizingly) almost static, rather than kinetic. 

And then Alwin Nikolais, the avant-garde choreographer (and costume designer, and lighting technician) who on top of everything else also made his own electronic music for dance, as extensively reissued by Creel: 

This is the kind of thing that would have shaped Douglas Davies's view of the way forward and possibly spurred him to do the book:  9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, a series of performances from October 13–23, 1966, where artists and engineers from Bell Laboratories collaborated, taking place at the Armory Center in New York. This then led to  a series of projects known under the umbrella of Experiments in Art and Technology.

Or Cybernetic Serendipity at the ICA in 1968

Retro-Futuristic Summer

 

Trap nostalgia 

"You can’t automatically make it 2009 again just by making some very 2009 music. But I have long wondered what’s going to break the stasis of big-deal rap music, and 2009 music might be the answer." - Tom Breihan

What was it David Cameron said about Tony Blair? "He was the future once"

The Future Shock Question....

....is a bit too huge of a question for me to tackle but briefly*

 1/ I’m not as depressed about music and lack of futurity as I was when I wrote Retromania, which was 2008-2010 when things seemed particularly stagnant and backward looking and recyclical. Everything in the book is still going on I think, but there do seem to be more things that seem either futuristic or at least highly contemporary in feel. Some of them I really enjoy (the trap end of things mostly) and others I don’t find that pleasing but I can still recognize there’s something going on there that’s striving to renew music (the Arca kind of stuff).  The trap stuff hits that sweet spot that I like where it’s new/modern but it’s also scenius-driven, it’s generating anthems or bangers, and it actually some kind of forceful presence in the world.

 2/ I think with innovation, you could distinguish between the absolutely new and the relatively new. So in the 20^th Century, there was a lot of absolutely new things that happened in music and in all the arts – usually these had some link to the cutting edge of technology, although there were also innovations in content, expression, extremity, or pushing traditional instruments (including the human voice) to the absolute limit. 

But a lot of what happens in popular culture is relatively new or contextually new  – it might be the drifting into (or conscious borrowing of) innovations that developed elsewhere (jazz, avant-classical etc) or from non-Western traditions. There are artists who do a mixture of things – some that are absolutely new (Beatles with “Tomorrow Never Knows” etc) and others that are contextually new (the kind of expressivity in “Eleanor Rigby” had never been heard in pop music before, I don’t think – although clearly in the novel or film that kind of mood had been broached before).  

Or a more recent example – there was a phase in hip hop and R&B in the early 2000s, where you heard all these sounds and riffs from techno and house – it was very exciting (Timbaland et al) but at the same it was ground already  broken in the early 90s in Europe. But in the context of rap it was a new thing and very exciting to hear on MTV / BET / the radio.

In terms of how innovation makes itself felt as such, I think there is no better analysis than Fredric Jameson’s in A Singular Modernity, particularly with this passage that I’ve quoted before, which captures the paradox of how we can listen to an old piece of modernist art or music or whatever, that ought to be stale and familiar, but somehow we can still feel its future-shock:

"the older technique or content must somehow subsist within the work as what is cancelled or overwritten, modified, inverted or negated, in order for us to feel the force, in the present, of what is alleged to have once been an innovation.....  "The act of restructuration is seized and arrested as in some filmic freeze-frame"  [and as a result the modernist work] "encapsulates and eternalizes the process as a whole."

That implies that innovation is always a move within and against an established tradition...  I don’t think that is actually case – I think there are moments of absolute innovation (musique concrete, early electronics etc). But those are few and far between and you can’t count on a steady supply. So more often it’s a case of the push to make-it-new occurring within and against the old -  e.g what Hendrix did with the electric guitar and blues, or what house did with  disco, hip hop did with funk, etc, or jungle even more so with funk and reggae, or postpunk with its various sources.

Another thing to consider is that innovation can also be linked up to more regressive (politically or emotionally or simply in terms of narrative structure) elements. So  - by far the most cutting-edge things going on with film on a technical level (effects, CGI, editing, sound, high def etc) occur in the most pulpy, lowbrow, and often reactionary or just simply juvenile areas of cinema: thrillers, action, superhero, kids cartoons etc.  Likewise you can have radical sonic things or techniques going on within genres that are otherwise very traditional in their musical structures and their emotion affect or mode of usage. The engineering etc in a Top 40 hit is cutting edge, but everything else in it might be fairly conservative.

I don’t think the future-shock effect is really relative to how much music history you know... because what we’re talking about is musical events that are not  reducible to references or influences... it’s a more-than-the-sum effect...  not addition but multiplication

I suppose the super knowledgeable might be more likely to hear the older elements (the residual, traditional stuff that is being reworked or cancelled)...  they might also happen to know of obscure precedents that preempt the supposedly new... but when something really truly new happens, the knowledgeable elder and the ignorant neophyte are in the same place really - dumbfounded.

Futureshocked.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

* "briefly" - famous last words! Well no one ever accused me of being a man of few etc etc 

The Shock of the Newcastle

 

Snapped off the TV from a YouTube British doc about Newcastle in 1966. Mostly about the vibrant youth culture there but it does show this architect's mock-up of plans for a revitalized and modernized pedestrian-only shopping center in the city.

Here's another view of the city from the wonderfully elegaic archi-critic Ian Nairn

I wonder if with that pained voice - he always sounds like he's wringing his hands, on the edge of tears  - Nairn could only have been an epigone? 

Or did the elegaicism condition and create the highly-strung voice? 

I've been to the city just once, in the early '80s - it is an exciting looking place. That bridge!

Three other things I remember from my visit:

Stotties

Pease pudding

A passer-by ejecting from his nostril into the gutter a long string of snot. Never seen that before, nor since I don't think. 

Contra Modernism

 

- Vladimir Jankélévitch

from Music and The Ineffable (1961)

Future Schlock

"Schlock" here used in the Yiddish-derived sense of "inferior or shoddy goods"

Oops, here's an earlier Hawkwind-related release one that isn't quite as eyeball-affronting  

Topic for discussion - the decline of record cover artwork. Every time I open a streamer and check out "Suggested New Albums for You", my eyes are assaulted. It's across the board, from obscure artists to prestige ones, major labels to minor labels. I can't remember the last time I saw a truly surprising or even attractive record cover. It makes sense that in the age of streaming it would have declined as a point-of-sale factor but... there's still this thriving vinyl sub-market, there's still artists who grew up with the notion of the beautifully packaged record and presumably care about how their releases manifest as objects in the world. 

These are today's offerings at Tidal 

The Jenny Hval one is tasteful and moderately intriguing... the Lucius dog-bared-teeth-snarl grabs the eye... There's a few that are so misconceived they become almost-interesting

Beyond the question of the revolting artwork, the algorithm's ideas of what might appeal on a purely audio level seem misconceived.... I can't correlate these suggestions with my recent listening apart from the inclusion of an ECM title

 

postscript: added this Prince album covers graphic in reference to a comment