McQueen’s past & our future

March 11th, 2010 Comments Off

It may be that the worlds of science fiction are simply more amenable to experimentation, individualism, and broad cultural and temporal appropriation. There is perhaps no better example of what we are missing in our current future than to gaze at the recently late Alexander McQueen’s last collection.

Any one who has read or watched a smattering of science fiction over the past decade or so can’t help but notice that one of the most stalwart of tropes is an eccentric diversity of clothing fashion (the earliest best representation of this on film was, of course, the famous bar room scene in Star Wars). Our descendents, it seems, are flagrantly and ostentatiously diverse and peculiar in their dress. There is, as there must be, metallic pants and epauletted shirts, but even more interestingly is the frequent blending of fashions of the past, present, and future to produce a bogglingly esoteric world of future fashion. This transtemporal or seriously anachronistic approach to what our future selves find fashionable, useful, and interesting offers a compelling vision, one that seems far, far away.

Why is this? We are, after all, living in the future now, and despite the best efforts of a small number of idealistic designers, a decreasing number of meaningful catwalks, and a few ballsy and wealthy women, our fashion is something all together conformist; conformed to a way of designing, dressing, and wearing clothes that comes from a fairly small band of years – at most stretching back to the second decade of the last century. Interesting perhaps. Stylish even. But hardly embracing of a couple of millennia of sartorial experimentation.

It may be that the worlds of science fiction are simply more amenable to experimentation, individualism, and broad cultural and temporal appropriation. There is perhaps no better example of what we are missing in our current future than to gaze at the recently late Alexander McQueen’s last collection.

Alexander McQueen's medievalia

Alexander McQueen's medievalia, from the WSJ.

Granted, I was trained as a medievalist, so there is much in this piece that sings to my heart anyway (minus, pace, the shoes). But while the design is unlike anything you’d see in the 14th or 15th Century, it evokes, and in evoking it regenerates meaning. Clothing that is about something: a reason to wear it in addition to the fact that it simply looks devastatingly good. Of course, tragically, no one will wear it now, except in reverential tribute.

There is hope and a way forward. The growth of custom tailors, available at a click; imaginative designers who embrace the new, even if it means breaking with the present and exploring the past; micro- or solo fashion houses exploring micromarkets across the economic spectrum; and an unmistakable tension across the entire cultural landscape between the old and the new; the west and the rest; as well as the conservative and the adventurous means nothing but opportunity.

Whether we’re all able to take advantage of that opportunity and find some other future other than that mired in ironic sameness is the question. An effort is underway.

Discontinuities and confusions, also feelings of togetherness

March 4th, 2010 Comments Off

Social media has been at the heart of a radical critique over the past few years – one I mostly agree with. A new exhibition – and salvo in this critique – at London’s HTTP Gallery of Annie Abrahams’ mostly telepresence performances attempts to make real and visceral the frequent feelings of agitation, confusion, and apprehension that permeate our communication (attempts?) within our vast, highly mediated, technology-enabled and constrained social networks. By focusing on glitches, incomplete understanding, partial revelation, and the inevitable mutation of meaning, sense, and shared experience, Abrahams lays bare the often overlooked/ignored side of interfaced relationships.

http://www.vimeo.com/8122362

Watching Abrahams’ creations (or maybe situations) is an exercise in abstraction, one that forces the participant to reveal what’s beyond the easy mental construct we’ve developed in an effort to integrate the ‘new social’ into our lives. It’s much the same as looking at the dog or cat curled-up on your lap, and forcing your mind to see it for what it is: a highly-carnivorous thick-furred four-legged mammal who is able to wander around your house at will. Objectively…probably not something we’d want, much like the aggravation of misunderstood expressions or awkward silences of mediated ‘friendship’. Yet, there is the cat; there is the list of friends.

The New Provenance

February 27th, 2010 Comments Off

Provenance is central to understanding where we’ve been. It is also crucial to the continued relevance and celebration of human-centered creative work. This essay examines the possibilities that a new provenance engenders for artists, collectors, and lovers of art, ideas, and passionate individuals.

If you are in New York, and of a certain persuasion, it is very possible that you have actively participated in the imbroglio of ‘is it or isn’t it’ concerning a statue that may (or may not) be an early work of Michelangelo, and that has recently (and indisputably) gone up for display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Early reports have viewers weighing in on its provenance, invoking everything from paleographic reportage to scrotal gravitational physics to argue one way or another. It’s all quite wonderful.

The Archer by Michelangelo

But provenance – concern for origins and chains of ownership (and occasionally influence) – is increasingly a meatspace concept. It is largely incomprehensible to the legion of mashup-remixing-repurposing appropriators that populate our (mostly digital) landscape of cultural production and reproduction.

My suspicion is that this ignorance or lack of concern for provenance has less to do with education (although in a world where there is always more to learn, that’s always an issue), and more to do with the provenancial baby getting tossed out with the copyright bathwater. And, that’s too bad, because I think a re-imagining of provenance could offer another invigorating aspect to contemporary art.

Here’s how this might work.

First, some assertions. If we are to avoid straying any further into an amorphous anti-human haze of sound, imagery, and objects d’art, some recognition of creative agent – a person – is compulsory. It is not enough to be the final smith – gathering pieces from here and there and then hammering them however skillfully or not into a whole. Instead, it is a recognition that each of those pieces is the result of an individual creative act. The end product – in this case – is not greater than the parts.

Furthermore it is clear, to all but a few hardy souls, that the intellectual property regime that has structured the relationship between creative individual and market is in tatters. Rending of clothing and tearing of hair, even if accompanied by laws that make the unusual effort to pay attention to realities on the ground, won’t put the Humpty Dumpty back together again. Something else is required.

Despite the ridiculous hype and misunderstanding that has accompanied it, the concept of a reputation economy remains a reasonably satisfying way to look at a great many contemporary (and future) creative transactions in both virtual and meatspace. Provenance offers a new currency for just such an economy, one that is more flexible and artistically-oriented than those underwritten by ineffectual and unenforceable intellectual property laws and their derivative markets.

Provenance has always been about attribution and ownership, both of which have enhanced the appreciation of individual works by viewers or listeners du jour. It permits a deep contextualization of the work, that in turn, deposits additional layers of experiences and meaning. If this sounds slightly familiar, it should. Provenance is already reflecting, embracing, and encouraging elements of the current creative climate. What is a mash-up if not a layering, an alternative conceptualization, a new hybridized statement of intent? Yet, the current approach ignores this context, or at least permits only a massively attenuated version of it to emerge, almost always stripped of the originating individual.

Provenance is not yet explicitly considered in the creation or appreciation of new pieces of compound art. Despite its power to evoke a more nuanced and richer experience, provenance hasn’t found a way in. This is due, I suspect, to two forces. The first is purely intellectual, not in the point-headed, ivory tower sort of intellectual, but rather in the understanding of provenance as an agent of humanization, of artistic responsibility. The second is technical. How might provenance be best incorporated or integrated? This latter force is of especial importance because it gets at the creative project itself; it becomes part of the work.

Both metadata and steganography offer ways to think about introducing provenance into work that would enhance, rather that detract from the final product. Imagine, for instance, entering a darkened room, a single large screen flickering in the middle of the space. As the video performance begins to play, one smaller screen after another lights up on the walls around you, until you are are surrounded with the provenance – made real – of the central work. Each screen is a work of its own, perhaps with its own provenance screens, but each contributing to the work at the center. Alternatively, perhaps the provenance is visible only through an augmented reality device like an iPhone.

Other examples are limited only by imagination. Music with alternate provenance channels or narratives accompanied by their predecessor sources are obvious. And the intentional incorporation of provenance needn’t be limited to the digital, although the digital permits the obvious locus for the provenance sources; the trick becomes one of moving back and forth between the work and its predecessors.

Of course, hypertext, or hyperlinks more generally, *could* make this possible now, but the information fog created by hyperpossibilities has rendered most authentic choices anything but, leaving no opportunity for considered or meaningful discretion. Human-centered work, defined partly in the role provenance has in the experience, can’t make choice central to the experience if the artist chooses to create a work that is explicitly embedded in the altermodern lattice of influence, derivation, and inspiration.

Provenance – if we are to be honest to the world we create – stands for something, against something. It stands for the role of individuals to come together across space and time to create new works, and it stands against the brownian noise of contextless appropriation. That it offers a way to reward while ensuring creativity reinvigorates and expands in new ways the role and importance of the market.

Amalgaming

February 12th, 2010 Comments Off

In this first piece on CULTURE LUST, I take a look at the convergence of freestyle gaming and augmented reality leading to amalgamate game spaces where programmers, architects, designers, actors, and other players shape the world.

I’m not a gamer like a lot of people are gamers. Yes, I’ve played Myst, WoW, CounterStrike, even Machinarium, but I’ve never been what anyone would call l33t. I find, too often, that the experience simply isn’t sustainable; or, at the very least, my attention span isn’t sustainable. Doing the same thing again and again, even if the monster is a different color, or the puzzle differently constructed, or the physics slightly skewed, turns the initial fun into something resembling work, which, after all, I can get plenty of at work.

Game developers have long recognized that with the exception of a small cadre of games, or game types, players really do want the option to go off script. But, in the well-worn world of the game, structure is critical, so even those opportunities to wander down a barely noticed hallway will only get you so far (think here of Half-Life or Grand Theft Auto). Of course, as anyone knows, this is not a problem unique to any artist or artistic undertaking. Structure gives the opportunity for story, which even in the post-modern haze of today is still a rather linear undertaking for both creator and consumer.

But take a game like Heavy Rain – due out later this month on PlayStation, and much hyped – where the action is not only (generally) nonlinear but also contextually driven. You have lots of choices – some significant some insignificant – but all with influence on how the subsequent experience evolves. How well Heavy Rain does will depend – on large measure – on how believable the experience is, how well players can understand and think through causality, and how successfully the narrative evolves.

The Heavy Rain press materials have made a big deal about how thick the script is, that it foresees almost every imaginable character interaction. This is impressive, yes, but still bounded, and necessarily so despite being a step (or giant leap) in the right direction.

So, on one hand we have this interesting development in gaming that stresses individual story development, unique experiences (since it is hard to believe that with x number of variable elements to the story that any two experiences will be exactly the same), and nonlinearity. And, on the other hand, we have some very interesting developments in augmented reality.

Augmented reality – known by the cognoscenti or hipsters or both as AR – is the overlay of data on the real world. A common application might have a user looking at a strip of storefront captured with the iPhone camera and seeing the names of the stores and their opening hours overlaid on the image. The idea is to use the vast information sources available elsewhere to supplement how we experience our visual (but could equally be aural) world. Like a lot of technologies, the real value is not in the actual whats but rather in the hows, and usually the unanticipated hows.

I think where this all gets very, very interesting is when you begin to combine the idea of gameplay with AR. Where immersive gaming is simply living. While this has been done on a painfully limited scale to date, the possibilities – for artists, for programmers, for architects, for designers, for actors, for gamers – abound.

At first, physical spaces would be appropriated, made dual-use by amalgames for gamers and non-gamers alike, both groups deeply immersed in realities not completely divorced from one another but deeply divergent. Think of overlapping geographies, overlapping and potentially dissonant interactions with causality, overlapping use paradigms for communal spaces. Imagine an amalgamer working assiduously against the flow of traffic in a subway, weaving in and out of the flow pushing against her. She’s aware of the bodies moving past her, jostling her, but she’s uncaring. To those around her, her actions are inexplicable since no train will be leaving from the platform for another 30 mins. To her, however, it’s all perfectly consonant with the road and directional signs painted on the walls all around, but visible only to her.

There will be a period of adjustment, much like that around pervasive use of Bluetooth headsets, when you’re never really sure if someone is speaking to you or to their friend in Cincinnati. And, while dual-use spaces will be useful, and in some cases, with particularly adept creators, integral to superb experiences, they’ll be difficult and tricky both as loci for story telling and social communion.

Although not necessarily an evolutionary step, since coexistence is much more likely, you can easily envision physical spaces repurposed and outfitted in their entirety so that the virtual intersects – intermixes – with the real. Skillful designers, programmers, and architects will be able to develop enormously compelling physical/visual admixes that will drive story and experience. Abandoned buildings, off-hour offices, depopulated post-5pm cities, late-night transport, purpose-built interiors and exteriors (gaming parks), networks of real estate managers, taxi-drivers, and others.

These others are important as well. Game developers need actors other than the players, forces that will move the story along a certain arc, away from others. Amalgames might include roles in other amalgames as part of the experience, or they might require actors who simply inhabit their normal selves but interact in particular, usually scripted manners. Out of work actors who want to work on method, passersby who would like to participate in a little performance, gamers taking a break, media covering the game, law enforcement, the amalgamation of real and virtual will inspire enormous creativity.

What’s really interesting – aside from the likely experience of amalgaming itself – is the challenge it presents for public space and social interaction. So much of meaning – particularly the consensual meaning that structures how we interact with one another and maintain social structure – relies on shared experiences of reality. Under normal circumstances what I see is what you see, what I hear you hear, what I understand to be there you understand to be there. While we often disagree on what all that might mean, we’re united in the collaborative experience.

It is usually a well-founded sign of insanity when we look at the same thing and see something completely different. In a world where my world is almost, but not quite your world, where my experiences differ from yours not just in interpretation but in character, where my game is your attempt to buy milk on the way home, insanity is longer quite the right word.

***

For more on augmented reality: Wikipedia, Technical Personal’s collection of some good examples is worth a visit to see what’s getting into the market, Bruce Sterling in his Wired blog – Beyond the Beyond –  is tracking AR, presumably for a new project, and finally Jim Vallino’s list of resources and links is a good place to get started.

  • See also…

    There is a companion project to CULTURE LUST, called Objects of Contemplation. There you will find bits and pieces from my wanderings that won't make it up here.

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