Monday, December 12, 2011
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
The Art/Cultural Singularity
I have been thinking about how the ideas of the Technological Singularity relate to art and culture. There are many places online to learn about what the Singularity is and what the different versions imply. Most of them are based on the exponential growth in computing that has been observed, called "Moore's Law".
Put simply, Moore's Law shows that the power of computers has been doubling roughly ever 2 years or 18 months since at least the 1970's or so and is expected to do so indefinitely. There is a lot of conjecture about this already and really no need to get into it. If anyone wants to find out the details of the singularity and it's implications, I recommend reading or at least skimming Ray Kurzweil's book "The Singularity is Near". The book is really an in depth analysis of the concept, with an overwhelming amount of data and over 50 charts that clearly explore the implications of exponential growth, present and future. After reading Ray's book and studying the Singularity from many other sources (podcasts and lectures), I would say that the main implication is that in the near future (20 to 40 years from now) the rate of growth in technology will be so fast that humans will be incapable of keeping up and understanding what is going on. To me, Ray's book and many other singularity theories, put forth 2 main points that will effect art and culture in the near future. Actually these effects are already being felt, although at this point they can still be ignored.
The first point is that any technology which can be classified as information will also be subject to the same rules of accelerated growth that is being seen in computers. The second point is that since the rate of advancement itself is speeding up than the time will soon come when all information based technologies will grow too fast for humans to keep up with them.
I began thinking about this kind of growth and change in relation to art, while in Second Life (SL). In SL, many people use "gestures" to express themselves and communicate. Gestures are a combination of sound bites, avatar animations, text and ASCI symbols. Many of the sound bites are taken from pop culture songs, movies, youtube videos and anywhere else from the internet. When a user becomes good at using triggers to play the gestures, it becomes an easy but expressive way to communicate. Actually, I have in the past had a negative opinion about "pop culture" thinking it to be the opposite of the creativity and individual expression that I always thought was nessessary for art. After seeing how people in SL express themselves using among other things, gestures, I was amazed at how pop culture can be used for individual expression. One of the things that made me realize this was a friend of mine from Austrailia. She has a certain creative style and scense of humor that comes through in her avatar's appearance and the way that she communicates using her gestures. She also likes to use several alternative accounts (alts). When people use alts, there is really no way to tell that it is the same person behind 2 different avatars. The names are different and usually the avatars look completely different. However, I would always feel like I could tell when this girl was using an alt by the way that she would use her gestures. She even used different gestures, but something of her shows through. I would call it personality.
Another eye- opening moment came when a friend on SL gave me a gesture that had a very strange song in it. Because of the internet, we are in a time when there is no need to wonder what something is or where it came from. I typed some of the words from the song, that I could remember, into youtube's search and found the video.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QS0q3mGPGg
It was a mixture of video footage from an interview with Charlie Sheen. His voice had been changed with an auto-tuner and put to music. At first glance, the video just seems wierd and funny, but after watching it a few times, It really seems to be some new form of artwork. Even though the video is made up mostly from the original interview, it seems to take on an entirely different feel and meaning. To me this is art.
These are just 2 examples among many, of how new art forms can pop up because of technology, but may not be recognized as such. One of the factors contributing to the rapid change in art and culture is the open source movement. The tools that are used for self expression are becoming increasingly free and easy to learn. Gestures can be made by anyone with a computer using free programs like Audacity. Second Life is free, Youtube is free. these are just a few tools being used but the idea is that anyone can take pieces of Pop culture and reorganize it in new and different ways for self expression. There are issues being tackled involving copy write laws. Its hard to tell where this will end up, but most of the content being generated from this regurgitation of media is not made with the goal of profit anyways.
Just as the technological singularity is an accelerated progression rater than a looming even, I would say that the changes taking place in art and culture are nothing new as well. However, due to the nature of exponential growth, there does come a point when things move to fast to keep up with. For example, many people of older generations have a hard time recognizing grafitti as art and instead see it as a mess or simply crime. It can be equally difficult to recognize many creative digital works. The difference is that new forms of media arise faster as time moves forward. This is mostly because they tend to build on each other and use more recent things as reference and subject matter. The snowball effect, rather than the domino effect. NEED CLOSING STATEMENT
THIS ENTRY IS A WORKIN PROGRESS
Put simply, Moore's Law shows that the power of computers has been doubling roughly ever 2 years or 18 months since at least the 1970's or so and is expected to do so indefinitely. There is a lot of conjecture about this already and really no need to get into it. If anyone wants to find out the details of the singularity and it's implications, I recommend reading or at least skimming Ray Kurzweil's book "The Singularity is Near". The book is really an in depth analysis of the concept, with an overwhelming amount of data and over 50 charts that clearly explore the implications of exponential growth, present and future. After reading Ray's book and studying the Singularity from many other sources (podcasts and lectures), I would say that the main implication is that in the near future (20 to 40 years from now) the rate of growth in technology will be so fast that humans will be incapable of keeping up and understanding what is going on. To me, Ray's book and many other singularity theories, put forth 2 main points that will effect art and culture in the near future. Actually these effects are already being felt, although at this point they can still be ignored.
The first point is that any technology which can be classified as information will also be subject to the same rules of accelerated growth that is being seen in computers. The second point is that since the rate of advancement itself is speeding up than the time will soon come when all information based technologies will grow too fast for humans to keep up with them.
I began thinking about this kind of growth and change in relation to art, while in Second Life (SL). In SL, many people use "gestures" to express themselves and communicate. Gestures are a combination of sound bites, avatar animations, text and ASCI symbols. Many of the sound bites are taken from pop culture songs, movies, youtube videos and anywhere else from the internet. When a user becomes good at using triggers to play the gestures, it becomes an easy but expressive way to communicate. Actually, I have in the past had a negative opinion about "pop culture" thinking it to be the opposite of the creativity and individual expression that I always thought was nessessary for art. After seeing how people in SL express themselves using among other things, gestures, I was amazed at how pop culture can be used for individual expression. One of the things that made me realize this was a friend of mine from Austrailia. She has a certain creative style and scense of humor that comes through in her avatar's appearance and the way that she communicates using her gestures. She also likes to use several alternative accounts (alts). When people use alts, there is really no way to tell that it is the same person behind 2 different avatars. The names are different and usually the avatars look completely different. However, I would always feel like I could tell when this girl was using an alt by the way that she would use her gestures. She even used different gestures, but something of her shows through. I would call it personality.
Another eye- opening moment came when a friend on SL gave me a gesture that had a very strange song in it. Because of the internet, we are in a time when there is no need to wonder what something is or where it came from. I typed some of the words from the song, that I could remember, into youtube's search and found the video.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QS0q3mGPGg
It was a mixture of video footage from an interview with Charlie Sheen. His voice had been changed with an auto-tuner and put to music. At first glance, the video just seems wierd and funny, but after watching it a few times, It really seems to be some new form of artwork. Even though the video is made up mostly from the original interview, it seems to take on an entirely different feel and meaning. To me this is art.
These are just 2 examples among many, of how new art forms can pop up because of technology, but may not be recognized as such. One of the factors contributing to the rapid change in art and culture is the open source movement. The tools that are used for self expression are becoming increasingly free and easy to learn. Gestures can be made by anyone with a computer using free programs like Audacity. Second Life is free, Youtube is free. these are just a few tools being used but the idea is that anyone can take pieces of Pop culture and reorganize it in new and different ways for self expression. There are issues being tackled involving copy write laws. Its hard to tell where this will end up, but most of the content being generated from this regurgitation of media is not made with the goal of profit anyways.
Just as the technological singularity is an accelerated progression rater than a looming even, I would say that the changes taking place in art and culture are nothing new as well. However, due to the nature of exponential growth, there does come a point when things move to fast to keep up with. For example, many people of older generations have a hard time recognizing grafitti as art and instead see it as a mess or simply crime. It can be equally difficult to recognize many creative digital works. The difference is that new forms of media arise faster as time moves forward. This is mostly because they tend to build on each other and use more recent things as reference and subject matter. The snowball effect, rather than the domino effect. NEED CLOSING STATEMENT
THIS ENTRY IS A WORKIN PROGRESS
Friday, December 2, 2011
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