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 It's hard to think one that isn't swiftly outdated, as the protean onrush of music culture makes its wayward way, usually involving swerves off track or double-backs.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