inventedworld

[inventedworld]

DELUGE

Déluge: a flood.

Après le déluge: a transformation. 

It seems to have happened while nobody was looking.  The irony, of course, is that  everybody was looking. We were all in the middle of it. We were all so swept up in the flood  that we didn’t even see it happening. It sent us all tumbling downstream like felled branches caught in rapids, like fallen leaves churned in the waves. In fact, if we’re being honest with ourselves, we were all the progenitors of the flood in the first place.

Sometime in the recent past, society’s collective consciosness transformed from  shared conversations that lingered in the air of the public square to ceaseless background chatter about stuff that nobody much remembers past lunch. To be clear, life always has a constant background soundtrack. There are always cognitive encroachments about the dishwasher needing to be repaired, the schools needing to be repaired, our bridges, our healthcare, our politics—all needing to be repaired. There are also less exasperating background vibrations: remarks about a lovely bloom of flowers planted around the mailbox, clear skies, lovers’ sighs, and babies’ cries. From a wider perspective, outside the bounds of our own experiences, the cultural background describes everything you’re not doing at this very moment, which means it changes like a kaleidoscope as you turn the wheel of your day. This is true for all societies, all the time. Since the earliest gatherings of proto-humans on the savannah there have always been stories that influence our lives, even if they all do not directly involve our lives.

In the 1980s a new trickle suggested something about to change. Satellite transmissions carrying twenty-four hour cable stations ushered in voices we might never have encountered before. Those new voices were still being selected by large corporate gatekeepers, so those voices were still carefully selected for relatively homogeneity. Considering that those new broadcast outlets all represented big-ticket enterprises, their messages and their spokespersons were heavily sanded down to blunt most of the sharp edges, but the new trickle nonetheless delivered fresh perspectives to the mainstream conversation.  Even heavily scrutinized and sanitized, new voices emerged, and as a result it’s wasn’t random coincidence that a completely new world of print publications suddenly found encouraging ground in which to sprout. (People read things on paper back then.)  Many flourished,  with nascent audiences discovering new niches where they found kinship.   

     In the 1990s that initial trickle rapidly swelled into a stream, then a river, then a torrent.  The World Wide Web and the ubiquitous rise of personal computers delivered words and pixels, and corporate watchdogs began to lose their stranglehold on distribution. That’s not to say that everything everyone distributed online was worth consuming. (Seriously.)  But seemingly overnight, we all became critics and we all became sophisticated consumers. As the saying goes, information wants to be free, and free information means an expansion of ideas. Civil rights bloomed for a minute at least, economic opportunities boomed, and the possibility that an ordinary person might actually carry a battery powered telephone in his or her own shoulder bag seemed like something aspirational. 

Everyone got laptops. Everyone replaced their shoulder bags with backpacks. Everyone logged on. Then, as if we had crossed a collective threshold, the dam burst. In just a few short years, we all discovered the secret potential of those phones in our backpacks, then our pockets, then our hands. They didn’t just make phone calls. They didn’t just write emails. They did everything.

And then we started doing everything. 

And then we started doing everything all the time.  

When a dam bursts, its formerly confined reservoir rushes forward without regulation. The flood crashes into whatever it meets, an onrushing mass of water and accumulated debris, unable to be denied. 

It was much the same with the information revolution. All of that sudden power did not confer equivalently sudden aesthetic or philosophical wisdom. Like a lottery winner who use her new financial powers only to spend her days buying dumb stuff and sitting on the couch (albeit a new, snazzy couch), we binged. The number one thing we collectively did with our Promethean information powers was unhinge our jaws and try to swallow as much newly emerging social media as possible—voraciously, absent-mindedly, relentlessly. We became boa constrictors incapacitated by trying to swallow not simply a goat, but an elephant.

The deluge swept through town and we hardly even noticed, because we were too busy scrolling, too busy being swept along in the torrent of our own making. Soon the common cultural touch points of our recent past — books, movies, music, major current events both good and bad—disappeared into endless slack-jawed scrolling for short-lived hits of dopamine. Meme? Move on. New meme? Move on. Really cool or funny meme? Maybe share, then move on. Repeat, repeat, repeat.  

People can hardly even watch a movie these days without a second screen in their hands, and it’s not as if the content on their second screens actually matters very much. Considering that even bright, highly motivated students are now seemingly incapable of reading a book, how could we possibly expect that collective culture might share a common conversation, serious or otherwise. It’s as if we were all suddenly too busy to pay anything much attention because we had serious scrolling, heart-ing, thumbs-upping to do. Cultural fragmentation overwhelmed society, a deluge we have unleashed upon ourselves. We’re lost at sea, and we’ve forgotten that we even used to enjoy the feel of grass beneath our feet. What’s more, but it doesn’t appear as if this is a flood that’s about to end any time soon. The dam  has given way. The valley lays submerged deep beneath the surface of muddy waters roiling above. 

It’s not over. Beware. If you’re thinking of taking a row boat out onto the water’s surface of that flooded valley, determined to cling to the book you’re writing, your movie you’re making, your big idea, and you’re determined to go see if you can find someone—anyone—similarly inclined on the distant shore who wants to talk about what you’re doing doing, check over your shoulder. See that? Beyond the wreckage of the information spillway, where the dam burst and the cacophonous flood rushed in, a larger wall looms. The difference with this wall is that it’s holding back the entirety of an ocean, and the tide is starting to slosh over the top.

This wall is the last revetment of cultural conversation. This is the last chance for us to remember how to value a shared experience or idea that lasts more than a few moments as we collectively scroll, scroll, click-click, and scroll some more. Right now, that protective sea wall looks like it’s about to give way, too. 

That’s AI, and most people are greedily eyeing the endless depths like sailors lulled by lethal siren song. Artificial intelligence, the stuff of countless pieces of speculative fiction and philosophical navel gazing, is not simply threatening to burst the sea wall and flood the mainland, but has already delivered catastrophic cracks. It’s here. Weeks? Months? Your little row boat will not survive unless you find a new strategy to float on top of the waves.

Here’s mine. I fight like mad to keep my beacon lit for like minded people out on the water in their own boats. I look for those who want to lash their boats together. I’m always scanning the horizon for smart people who want to capture the flotsam of seeming detritus caught up in the swell, and repurpose it into a shared  floating island of sorts. I’m determined to do more than tread water, forever scrolling, scrolling, scrolling like a duck’s feet madly paddling beneath the water’s surface, barely moving the bird above.

I cannot fight the sea. Like the flood, the sea is next, and larger than me in almost every way. But it’s not larger than me in all ways, and it’s in that narrow space where I stake my ground. I do not outsource my writing to AI. I do not outsource my photography to AI. I do not outsource my video editing to AI. Do I use AI? Of course. Do I share things on social media? Sure. You’re reading something now that you likely received through social media. My point is that I commit to not capitulating to the deluge. I commit to listening to books and music and—especially—human conversations as closely as I can. I try to commit to reading things without doing something else at the same time. I try to commit to generating my own thoughts whenever possible without synthetic suggestions served to me on a glowing screen. 

The deluge may have flooded the valley, and the sea threaten to flood the world. I commit not only to remember the feel of green grass beneath my feet, but to cultivate a patch of it on whatever dry ground I can find and protect.

@michaelstarobin

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[inventedworld]

Our AIs, Ourselves (An Essay by and for Humans)

“Hey Siri, please read Michael’s latest blog.”

 If your phone just did an annoying back flip because it said its own name out loud and then triggered another nearby iOS device to respond….you’re welcome. We live in strange times, as uncharted as any undiscovered terrain might be without a map. What I’m presenting today is a carefully focused spotlight on what might casually appear to be a tiny detail in this emerging world. I think, conversely, it’s a Rosetta Stone. 

 Here’s why. This whole thing turns on the use of a single word in my first sentence: please. In this context it’s not what you think. I mean, sure, it’s always good to be polite, and the conventions of civility in common speech are certainly appropriate for all of us to revisit. But let me re-cast the sentence with a subtle modification, and then we’ll discuss it.

 “Hey Siri, read Michael’s latest blog.”

 Not very different, right? It’s just missing that one word: please. If we’re being honest about this, who cares?, especially considering that I’m only speaking to a digital assistant. What does it matter if I skip a single, socially lubricating word when I’m talking to a massive, yet barely-out-of-diapers LLM housed in the cloud? I might be saying words, but nobody’s ears are really listening to what I’m saying. (And before anyone raises the thorny issue of how how potentially extraneous words asked of AI actually cost real money and energy, I’m sidestepping that matter for the purposes of this essay.)

 The naturalist Aldo Leopold famously said,  “Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.” When I speak to an AI assistant—and this applies to any of those currently in use— I’m just issuing instructions to a machine in ways that may once have been entering through a long—very long—stream of keystrokes on my laptop. How could there be value in sounding polite when there’s nobody to be either respected or degraded by my behavior?

I’ll highlight three reasons why this matters. 

 Here’s the first. Does the habit of issuing a verbal command of any sort degrade my own behavior when I’m not paying attention to how I sound? If quality of action—any action— is a direct product of quality of practice, then my practice communicating requires me to maintain good communication habits. Said another way, if I’m only a decent person when I act like a decent person, doesn’t the habit of trying to sound like a decent person help me solidify the intentions behind my words? As Leopold suggests, this would stand to reason even when nobody else is watching…or listening as the case may be.

 The second reason concerns a bizarre digital test of The Tragedy of the Commons. (Click the link if you don’t know this reference. It’s a vital thought experiment for our time.) Since large language models rely on iterative feedback to “learn” how to think, I must be aware that my own behavior with LLMs are fundamentally part of their evolution. How I interact with the tool will shape how the tool interacts with me. Taken a step further, my interactions with the tool will influence how it comes to “understand” its interactions with other people, too. It’s true that my own tiny list of commands will have only an infinitesimal influence on Siri’s ethical trajectory, but that’s the whole point of The Tragedy of the Commons. It’s only when everyone looks out for the value of the community’s common resources that the community can retain resources of value. Does my own lack of civility with my inhuman assistant train that assistant to sound less civil? If the answer is either “Yes”, or “Who cares?”, I worry that my own ethical center is hollow. More to the point, incivility to my AI means that it will not learn basic social graces, which will contribute to the overall decline of similar graces as it interacts with others. As already demonstrated, this leads to a negative feedback loop, in this case distributed across the broader base of users. Inevitably this behavior will permeate from the digital world to the real world.

 The third point is the most critical. In practicing civil speech with my digital assistant, I’m essentially habituating myself to interact with other living, breathing people in a civil tone. In my estimation, this is not just an aesthetic preference, or a utilitarian cost/benefit evaluation. It is subtly different than my first point, too, precisely because it has to do my externalized relations. My first point has to do with my own sense of self, and how I might practice and thus reinforce my own behavior. In this third point, I’m extending my personal, ethical development to direct interactions with the world around me, and when I say “world”, I really mean “people”.  

 Here’s a refraction. When I’m on a TV or movie set, a whirlwind of activity inevitably swirls. No matter how well organized the team, no matter how good our pre-production planning, or how smart or even dedicated the crew, urgent concerns will inevitably present themselves all day long. Thrilling though it may often be, production can be an edgy business, with ticking clocks measuring ferocious financial burn rates, to say nothing of a million forces conspiring to impede achievement of creative excellence. To steal a line from The Bear, “Every second counts.” 

That edginess means it’s easy to be short with people. Snippy. Curt. When the volume gets turned up, orders have a tendency to be barked rather than requested. It’s practically cliche how some production executives can tromp all over junior crew. (Drives me nuts. I never think this is okay.)

To be clear, you probably shouldn’t get into the game if you’re thin skinned. In the heat of battle, stuff has to happen, and that often means it has to happen without a lot of discussion. As much as I believe production sets should always support a deep sense of intense collaboration, they are not democracies. 

That leads me back to my AI. When I ask my digital assistant to retrieve a document or read something out loud or schedule a calendar event, I never have to discuss it. But when I ask a production assistant or an actor or an electrical grip to do something on set, it’s not the same. I’m not necessarily inviting a conversation, and I’m also not asking for a counter-proposal, but I must always be aware that there is the potential for a response, a new idea, an observation, or even an unexpected emotion. I cannot bark an order without awareness that staff from other departments may also be clamoring for my crew member’s attention. I also cannot make a demand without some measure of awareness that the person I’m directing might have other forces pressing their attention, trivial or significant. I’m talking to a person, in other words, and no matter how crazy the moment on set might be, I’m still talking to a person. As far as I’m concerned, that statement alone invests certain categorical imperatives. 

I try to remember to say, “Please,” and I try to remember that the word is not just a formality. I mean it when I say it, even though it’s just one single word. When I say “please”, I’m reminding myself that I’m speaking to a person, with all of the person-ness that every single one of us brings to the day. That means ipso facto I’m not talking to a machine. 

Siri doesn’t require such social awareness to do what it was designed to do. It doesn’t require please, and it is not (to my knowledge!) insulted when I forget it.  But as we all start to lean on various AI systems for more and more of everything, it seems to me that how we treat our robots will ultimately have a direct influence on how we treat each other. 

@michaelstarobin

facebook.com/1auglobalmedia

ADDENDUM:

For those who wonder what the billionaire class of AI developers thing about this whole subject, the NY Times recently published a story you might find interesting. Funny thing is that I had completed THIS BLOG before that NYT story hit the ‘net. I simply had to smile.

[inventedworld]

INFINITE COMBINATIONS

Parris Goebel is the choreographer of the moment.  As dancers go she’s a polymath, drawing on references and techniques from as disparate sources as traditional Polynesian styles and hip-hop. One of her dances draws from the Siva Tau, a traditional Samoan war dance.

Hold that thought.

Multiple Nobel science prizes awarded last year went to researchers who required multi-disciplinary backgrounds to do what they did. The chemistry prize went to chemists who were really computer scientists. Stepping back from their achievement, we see that the three award winners relied on databases previously amassed by thousands of other chemists.

And…hold that thought, too.

In creative expressions of all sorts, we have always experienced news works inspired by unexpected sources, or at least sources that may not have captured mainstream attention yet. But in the era of instantaneous information distribution, we have finally arrived at a moment where a profoundly deeper ocean of ideas have the potential to be influential. The truism that artists should create based on what they know still holds true. To wit, Van Gogh painted a wheat field in motion because he saw wheat fields in motion in real life.  It’s not a stretch to imagine a choreographer similarly inspired by similar sights. It’s also not a stretch to think that medical researchers might be inspired by what were once impossible inventions of science fiction. The point here is that ideas are no longer bound by time and space and opportunity. In fact, since you’re likely reading this on a hand-held device, you’re intimately aware of just how many ideas are pulling at your attention right now. Too many, most likely.

In the original Star Trek (shout out to fellow Trekkers!), the founder Gene Roddenberry floated an idealistic concept that largely shaped the moral center of the show. He called it “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations”. As a physical object, presented in an episode called “In Truth is there no Beauty?” , the IDIC medal implied something that our future culture would value enough to serve as the basis for a high honor. As a story element the award never really caught on—we don’t see it again in the series (it was kind of a hokey clunker, if we’re being honest)—but as a narrative concept, it became the soul of something that continues to resonate for those who care to listen.

As a concept it’s also a surprisingly concise way of capturing the whole point. In fact, it’s prescient. Expertise in any discipline or skill demands focus and repetition and insight. Innovation requires expertise that has the wisdom to draw lessons from other disciplines. That requires not only an openness to otherness, but a curiosity and respect for otherness—infinite diversity in infinite combinations, in other words. This is, ironically, something that’s been happening automatically through genetic mixing for about two billions years. Genes, which are essentially just information coded into molecules, recombine. That recombination enables evolution, which is effectively the process where something new emerges from the stuff that already exists. 

Taken as a weather vane for the future of innovation, the forecast looks exciting. With essentially limitless combinations, one can imagine untold discoveries in science, art, culture, and even political thought. But endless opportunity does not always enable endless innovation. More tools do not make a better artists. Let’s also not pretend that the advent of Artificial Generalized Intelligence presents serious risks to this process. (Next month’s blog discusses a key aspect of cultural transformation due to AGI. Mark your calendars!) The challenge is in being both selective and disciplined about how to approach creative work. Ideas by themselves will not generate great work. Everyone has a great idea for a movie, but most people never figure out how to do the monstrously hard work of making one. Simultaneously, we are now all capable of encountering the most esoteric information at all times, in just about any format and at just about any level of depth and complexity that we may want to pursue. We must make choices. Not everything possible is worth pursuing, but figuring out which unexpected pursuits might deliver something moving and meaningful is now a fundamental part of the process of making anything. 

@michaelstarobin

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[inventedworld]

CREATIVE PULSE

On a recent creative retreat in the tropics, largely unplugged and undistracted by the perils and exasperations of daily life, I touched the ground with bare feet. Broad leafed trees sprawled and stretched everywhere, massive emerald canopies drooping in languorous abandon. As soon as I arrived I immediately luxuriated in the sight of their curvaceous edges and wide, richly colored bodies, connected to immense stems live living sculpture. I didn’t ponder their evolution exactly, nor did I spend much time comparing them to mental images of leaves closer to home. I simply noticed them. I enjoyed their arcs, their hues, their immensity, their intensity. Surrounded by them everywhere I walked, I was reminded constantly that the world is large and there are nearly limitless sensations to experience in even the most ordinary things. 

Beyond those trees, I took pleasure in the shapes of tiled roofs, rippled like terra-cotta corduroy sloping down to meet long gutters running to downspouts. I welcomed the fast rising and fast setting tropical sun, a daily transition between bright and night that took on a lyrical quality, an agreeable change of key. I even smiled at the busted roads, complete with local drivers of dust-covered heaps that never made it above 40KPH. 

In working sessions I paid attention to technique, motivation, intention, and above all actually doing something substantive. My deal with myself was that I couldn’t just walk away from working on what I initially set out to do. To be clear, creative work like this isn’t exactly hard. Removed from the churn of normal days, creative work becomes its own reward. The biggest challenge is to commit to your own promises to yourself.

On the final morning I re-filled my water bottle, preparing for a long, bumpy ride back to a small airport and an inevitably tedious day of anodyne travel. Above the fountain, a small batik of two elephants with intertwined trunks hung on the wall. I’d noticed this otherwise unremarkable decoration throughout the entire week every time I’d gotten water, but until that moment it had hardly been more relevant than an equally unremarkable pair of plain wooden benches on the nearby patio. On that final day those elephants became something more. The painting did not improve, and neither did the trees themselves. The ordinary benches stayed rooted in space, soaked in blazing, ever-present afternoon sun. What caused the transformation for me was the stinging awareness that I would not likely see these particular sights again, ordinary as they may be. Their ordinariness, their rootedness to place without profundity beyond simple existence, describes the beating heart of being fully present.

My work comes with me. Empowered by ordinary laptops and paper notebooks and small format cameras, geography does not impose many limits unless I’m deep into something large enough that it requires a crew on site (and I love those projects too, BTW!). I’m reminded that I will get stuff done only if I commit to getting it done. (Whether it’s good is another matter entirely.) I’m also reminded that ordinary things are everywhere. The benches, the goofy elephant picture, the water fountain, even the tropical leaves in all directions were not in themselves the source of inspiration. Inspiration comes from following through with goals. It comes from doing the work. It comes from noticing events of the day, the chaos of monkeys howling in the trees, the acrid tang of a poorly maintained pick-up truck’s exhaust, the sweet burst of a freshly picked orange. 

What makes those ordinary things take on extraordinary velocity has to do with allowing yourself to get out of your usual day-to-day experiences. The ordinary sight of broad leaves and bright sun are not in themselves inspirational. What inspires is the potential that you might actually be fully present in your life for a fleeting moment to stand under the shade of those leaves, and then feel the warmth of the sun when you step out into the light.

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[inventedworld]

THE MERGER

You are the competition. 

So are your neighbors.

So are your kids. 

Since everybody posts photos on social media apps all day long, the value of photos overall has plummeted. That’s just basic economics. 

The recent announcement about two of the world‘s largest stock photography companies merging reflects this market reality. With everyone clicking and posting photos all day long with their cell phones, the challenge of finding interesting photographs isn’t especially hard. It’s worth adding that photography—and video, too, considering just how much video both of these companies also sell—not only suffers devaluation as a commodity with this merger, but also as a by-product of waning audience interest. Ubiquity breeds dispassion. 

There are two things going on here. First there’s the matter about big business and how that affects creative work. Second, and perhaps more importantly, this is a story about creative devaluation. Shutterstock and Getty used to compete, and for many professional media people, each service was effectively interchangeable. They may have had different account numbers and different billing requirements, but it didn’t really matter. If you needed a picture of a giraffe nibbling acacia leaves at sunset, you could easily find one on either site.

What most people don’t realize, of course, is that each of these companies themselves already had gobbled up many other companies. Getty and Shutterstock were already giants. A range of stock footage and animation and graphics and even audio services operated beneath the shade of their umbrellas. If this new merger between their front offices survives anti-trust scrutiny, we’ll effectively be left with  one behemoth to rule them all.

Does anybody care? Should we care? I’m not worried in terms of finding that singular giraffe image, or any other easily identifiable asset that I may need for a quick turnaround production. I worry for reasons that lurk beneath the surface like shallow rocks at the shoreline. 

This concern is really a subset of overall consternation about the seemingly inexorable trend towards corporate consolidation in all industries. Every week we seem to hear that there are fewer and fewer big corporate holding companies that essentially regulate all aspects of modern life. Most people don’t realize that the marquee names they all know are often bulwarks behind which countless other companies purport to operate under their own banners. Most people don’t realize, in other words, that so many big banners are actually just pixelations comprised of a slew of smaller banners.  

For creative people and the work they do this troubles me. The more we face narrower corporate uniformity, the harder it is for fresh voices to find purchase in the global marketplace. The more that creative work must conform to the dictates of mega-corporations, the more we smear the lines of distinction and voice and purpose. If this merger goes through and you’re a pro photographer looking to sell your work as stock, for example, you’ll have essentially just one place where it might be showcased in any meaningful way. Sure, you can post it on social media or your own websites as much as you want, but if you’re trying to do mainstream business, you’re essentially going to be left with only one place to negotiate. As the saying goes, the power of the free press only matters if you happen to own one.

As much as some participants may try to pretend otherwise, creative work often concerns pure commerce. A client needs something—an image, a tune, a video, a hand-carved wooden table—and an artist fills that need. But clearly the souls of artists move from forces far more complex than making a sale. Artists need to make things. They need to make sales to keep making things. Sometimes the can make a living by doing both—making and then selling—but the point is that when the marketplace consolidates, artists have a tougher time selling. That means they then have a harder time making, and because of that, overall culture retreats, becoming duller and grayer.

And who wants to live in a monolithic culture?

@michaelstarobin

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[inventedworld]

QR CODES at the MUSEUM

Some people prefer ball games. I get that. Huge stadiums, hot dogs, afternoons outdoors among cheering throngs: for lots of people this sounds like fun. With the exception of determining an inevitable winner and loser, going to a ballpark is entirely unlike watching a game on television.

It’s also entirely unlike visiting a museum except for one thing. Trips to a ball park and trips to a museum require visitors to be physically present. In the same way as watching a game on television, seeing a painting on a screen is a wholly different experience from seeing it in real life.

That’s why one particular, rapidly proliferating trend in museum curation causes me to shout at the umpire. In the past few years, and especially following cultural trends that accelerated after the pandemic, museums have turned to QR codes to augment visitor experiences.

Sweetheart, hold my calls. 

It’s not that I don’t understand the efficiency of QR codes. With QRs, museum staff  can effectively deliver infinite informational resources on demand, at a cost that’s far less to deploy than carefully prepared signage or staff on hand. The problem is that museum guests often find themselves face down in their glowing glass screens rather than being present in the presence of the actual art in the first place. They may come to a gallery, but by having to interact with their phones they might as well be anywhere, or nowhere. It’s bad enough that people feel compelled to upload endless social media posts while in a gallery. With QRs integrated into visitor experiences, people now swipe and scroll just to learn basic information about the artists and the work. Then, inevitably, they check their social media to see if anyone has interacted with their own posts from five minutes ago. And then they see a funny meme and feel compelled to comment. And they get an alert from their group chat and can’t pass up a quick emoji reply. And then, oh wait! They forgot to add a couple of things to their to-do list, so they take care of that too. And, hey, who is this painter dude anyway? “I forgot, but can just Google it later…” 

The point of being in an art gallery is to experience art in a place that’s outside normal life and ordinary living spaces. Galleries focus attention in much the same way that movie theaters focus attention on a movie, which is theoretically differently than watching one from your couch. (Don’t get me started…)  Going to a museum is a social experience, even as it can also be also a personal, even intimate experience. Reading descriptions on gallery walls helps keep visitors present in the physical space of the work, rather than shifting attention back to the bottomless void of our wireless devices. 

I’m sensitive to the economic realities pressing hard against museums. I also fully appreciate the lure of enabling interactivity whenever possible, plus the contemporary desire to feel like we have a smidge of personal agency to steer the path of our days. But in enabling visitors an easy means for having one foot outside exhibits, curators erode their biggest reason for existing in the first place, namely as a destination for people to experience ideas in the real world that they simply can’t get the same way in virtual spaces.

Perhaps that’s one of the key reasons I like spending time with artists, too. No matter the format or activity, artists always know the strength of a creative moment comes from bring fully present in the real world. That’s why QR codes annoy me when I encounter them at a museum. I’d rather be fully present in the space of the work itself, rather than in dialogue with an electronic intermediary who’s content creators are far more interested in holding my attention on their screens.

@michaelstarobin

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[inventedworld]

PLASTICS: What We Lose When Reality Isn't Important

Very few individual words, taken out of context, can instantly evoke a piece of creative enterprise. Plastics, for good or bad, is one of them.

I’m referring, of course, to the legendary scene from Mike Nichols 1967 film “The Graduate“. In it the young protagonist listens to an older businessman share his personal view about how to achieve success with one singular word. You can watch the scene right here.

That culturally indelible moment has deep metaphoric resonance to this day, not least because plastics may be part of the accelerating degradation of life on earth. Every day we read stories about plastics infiltrating the biosphere, showing up in the food chain, even influencing the chemistry of our own bodies. Not only are micro plastic particles getting into everything, but also the chemicals that make plastics are also getting into everything. And let’s not forget that at the base of that chemical origin story we find petroleum, the nemesis of responsible climate stewardship. In other words, plastics are no joke, and despite that ironically famous scene from The Graduate, they most certainly are not the key to success for life on Earth.

But in a case where the author (that’s me) is fully aware he has buried the lead, I’m going to pivot sharply and declare that this essay is actually not about plastics, per se. This essay concerns the metaphor of plastics in terms of modern media.

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I love movies. To me they are one of the primary food groups. (Let’s see: there’s air…water…pizza….books....movies….yep! That about does it.)  As a movie fan, I’m an avid student of how the medium has changed since its earliest days when it printed images on celluloid. Back then a movie required a hot lamp to shine light through a long skein of moving film, casting shadows on a reflective screen. Very quickly the craft of making and presenting movies evolved. Lighting, cameras, even the development of a vernacular grammar about how movies communicate all contributed to an evolving art form. Part of that process included the advent of special effects, starting with clever practical sight gags done in front of the camera. Another part of that process involved different ways to move a camera through a scene, or illuminate a shot so that it didn’t look like a stage play. In short, movies prompted creative people to invent new methods for telling stories. Audiences knew that a giant, angry gorilla had not, in fact, climbed up the Empire State Building, but a willing suspension of disbelief was the whole point. People went to the movies to see things we knew were not real, from gigantic gorillas to spaceships, sports dramas to star crossed lovers against the world, and more.

As happens in all industries, advances in technique and technology changed the state of the art over time. New ways of doing things transformed what’s possible. 2001: A Space Odyssey looked tremendous in its day, but its grandest outer space scenes pale compared to even ordinary shots done for episodic television today. These days when you flop in front of your TV, you don’t give these kinds of shots a moment’s thought.  

The pressures to make a buck have always and inevitably been the wolf at the movie producer’s door. To be clear, producers aren’t alone in their interest to make money. Screen writers, directors, actors and production designers also want to get paid, along with everyone else on the crew. The difference, generally speaking, is that craft professions—the “makers”—start their days as artists first. Producers, alternatively were born to make bank. That means if something can be done less expensively, it often is. And that leads us back…to plastics.

Just about any show or movie you watch these days, from Brobdingnagian tentpole productions like House of the Dragon, to character driven dramas like The Diplomat, have turned to computer generated sets for seemingly ordinary scenes. So many things are shot on various kinds of virtual sets that actors and directors less frequently get to fully steep in a sense of place. That doesn’t mean modern creative teams can’t do good work; they clearly can. But over time, I think there’s something eroded in the foundations of culture every time a prop or a throne room gets inserted electronically by work done in a quiet computer lab isolated from the living, breathing crew. 

I recognize there are grounds for immediate protest here. Obviously there were no dinosaurs walking next to the actors in Jurassic Park. There was no jump to lightspeed with elongated stars shining through the forward screens of the Millennium Falcon. It’s arguable that the modern use of artificial everything is simply a continuation of a trend that started long, long ago. My concerns here are not so much about the growth in technical capabilities, but rather the lack of awareness about what the implications are when artificial production aspects begin to dominate the creative process rather than simply dress the creative process.

It’s getting harder to tell what’s what every year. In 2024 I can sometimes tell where a car crash or flock of birds or crowd of extras have been artificially placed in a shot. I’m aware because I work in this business and I recognize the “tells”—thin halos of lighting imperfections around hairlines, geometry that looks ever so slightly off, odd shadows. But to be clear, most of the time I can’t tell at all. The technology and the artists who use it are good enough that oftentimes it’s tough to tell if a scene was shot on set, on location, or in the nowhere void of a CGI volume.

As these technologies get better, they will take over more and more of the screen. And as everybody knows, as soon as artificial intelligence evolves a few more generations, they will replace many actor roles as well. Then — don’t roll your eyes—it won’t be too long before artificially generated scripts begin to filter in to the media landscape. Think of it: synthetically scripted productions, created with realistic looking AI actors, captured on sets that don’t exist in the real world anywhere. Think that’s far off? Nope. Consider this real world example. There were real, human writers (at least), but you can see where this is all going. 

We’re dealing with plastic media. Just like plastic bottles, toys, automotive dashboards, and a million other things, these are all artificial, effectively lifeless creations, and they pollute the cultural environment. That doesn’t take away from the fact that they were invented by expert, perhaps even superb media wizards who could cook up new substances in a lab. It just sidesteps the same question as what we should do about plastics entering the ecosystem. In much the same way as physical products have unintended consequences, one has to ponder how plastic media may be poisoning the creative ecosystem. The less we as creators actually exist in real spaces, even if we are creating those spaces in our own imaginations, the more we lose our connection to those real spaces.

I also chafe at the financial pressures inherent to this trend. In the short term everyone saves money, makes money, floods the marketplace. In the not very long term, once can easily imagine a marketplace flooded with flotsam, infinite mediocre supply chasing finite, unenthusiastic demand. 

I don’t want to walk among artificially generated Redwood trees. I want to walk among actual redwood trees.  I don’t want to just get the idea of sun on my shoulders while walking amid ancient Greek ruins on a Mediterranean island. I actually want to smell the salt water and feel the grit of ancient sands on my feet. The more I start to feel that real-world, human aspects of creative work are becoming secondary considerations, the more I feel that we are all in the process of being melted down and molded in to useless bits of plastic. Like recycled plastic bottles, we may be able to contain the contents of story, or sound, or whatever is being presented, but in the process, we may be losing ourselves to irrelevant content without soul or feeling. 

If that becomes the norm, the real question for all of us will soon be, “How will we be able to tell the difference about what really matters if we all just accept artificial worlds as real enough?” 

@michaelstarobin

facebook.com/1AUglobalmedia

[inventedworld]

ART IN A TIME OF SMOKE AND CINDERS

Missiles rain.

Seas rise.

Illness spreads.

Anger rises.

Autumn sun washes trees in gold.

Orange leaves settle like memories. 

Acorns skitter and settle, promising trees.

Birds gather, resolved for warmer climes.

Green tea tints steaming water. 

Natural rhythms persist even while human players beat drums of threat and peril. Only the most willfully self-absorbed cannot hear the sounds. 

Me? I’m sipping tea, thinking.

Unlike the changing of the seasons, the reliability of the dawn, and the promise of stars when night falls, a rising general animus borne of impending multifarious peril springs directly from human behavior. Said another way, many of the challenges we face are products of our own choices, individually and collectively. There are no wars, no depredations of the natural world, no denial of diseases or poverty or pollution, and no out-of-balance allocations of assets and opportunities that arise from naturally occurring pronouncements. Those are all functions of human decisions, big and small.

There are other human choices, too, and in times of struggle I lean on these alternatives for succor. In fact, the more that people present the worst aspects of their great potentials, the more I find myself paying attention to the precise alchemy of poetry.  I spend time considering photographs that transcend ordinary visual depictions. I envelope myself in the sensuality of music, the pulse of choreography, even the frozen lyricism of inventive architecture. The more the sound of angry voices rises with the smoke of a burning world, the more I embrace the elan vital of art.

It’s election season, obviously, and while I may claim like a simpleton that I’m embracing art, I’m also paying close attention to the civic world around me. I’m conscious of my quickened pulse, even as I’m also consciously aware that my soul desires a more peaceful pace. No matter what Election Day may bring —and I’m conscious that on whatever date you may be reading there will likely remain massive uncertainties ahead — it would be irresponsible to pretend that the travails of the day can just be ignored. They cannot be ignored. Artists especially cannot avert their eyes, even as the balm of creative work promises a cloak of comparative purpose, or at least meaningful pursuit. To pretend that our collective, human induced problems are not substantial would be to assert an abdication of civic engagement. 

But in that engagement, we must not succumb to an abandonment of alternatives. Creative works are almost always shared works. Most people do not create in isolation, nor do they absorb the fruits of creative work in isolation. It is only through acts of creation that we choose to reject the growling threats of division. 

I take that as a declaration of optimism in the face of hard evidence to the contrary. I take that as a charge against the gravity of despair. I regard acts of creation as a willful mechanism to forestall easy vilification of those with whom I have disagreements. Why? When we ask each other to consider a work of art—a photo, a song, a poem, a garden—we invite a dialogue, and when we’re in dialogue with each other, it’s harder to scorch the air we’re both breathing.

@michaelstarobin

facebook.com/1auglobalmedia

linkedin.com/in/mstarobin

[inventedworld]

INFLUENCERS

A significant number of readers can probably recall a time when substantial creative works actually played a role in shaping broader cultural conversations. A casual perusal of important books from the 1980s immediately recalls the many ways their contents suffused American life, even among those who haven’t read them. Consider this short list:

The Color Purple

Neuromancer

The Satanic Verses

The Bonfire of the Vanities

A Brief History of Time

I’m conscious of how influential creative expressions from previous eras delivered their cultural payloads through different media mechanisms than they do today. (We can leave that examination for another day.) I’m also focusing on the 1980s precisely because the media landscape in that decade describes global cultures avant les déluge.  Anyone remember just how much cultural muscle the magazine market exerted with weekly articles and photo-spreads? Make a sandwich, open a magazine, read something with lunch: ordinary behavior in 1980. The implications of that behavior, however, extend far beyond simply consuming content in non-electronic formats. A culture capable of even casually reading anything — car magazines, gossip magazines, music magazines, newspapers— meant its citizens were capable of simply focusing on something—anything—for more than a fleeting moment, by which I mean minutes not seconds. Hold that thought (if you can focus for more than a fleeting moment), ‘cause I’ll be back to it shortly.

In the 1980s, things began to change. No single factor provoked this, although multiple contemporaneous forces converged, as is often the historical norm during moment of profound change.  (For your consideration: the end of The Cold War; satellite communications; personal computers)  Pop music encountered, for better or worse, the second British Invasion, amplified by the era’s biggest meme machine, MTV. Hollywood, for better or worse, began to get its hands around the idea of tentpole properties—think Back to the Future and Indiana Jones— rather than “major motion pictures” from the previous decade —think Apocalypse Now and Chinatown. CNN inaugurated the first 24-hour news cycle in any medium. Nobody watched it very much in the beginning, but the awareness that such a thing existed at all—24 hours of news every day!—rapidly changed expectations about how often anyone might need or want updated information about anything.

I started this essay focusing on books for a reason. Books, I believe, often amount to leading cultural indicators of deep cultural changes, as well as simultaneous mechanisms for making sense of where we’ve already been. The list at the top suggests both. In just five titles, we see windsocks about identity politics, technological inseparability from all aspects of modern life, and existential examinations placed in the cultural foreground. Even among the many people who did not read these titles, these books and a small pile of others profoundly changed the cultural conversation. They were influencers. If you have any doubt about their profound influence [sic], consider:

The Color Purple has recently been turned into a movie for the second time, and continues to function as a vital engine for cultural dialogue

Apple released what might arguably be the first mainstream mirrorshades

Western tensions with wide portions of the Islamic world have not abated

Wealth disparities have expanded and become more visible and more divisive

Scientific and technical conversations have become a daily part of ordinary life, including extraordinary telescopes designed to rewrite our understanding of our own cosmic origin story

Change accelerated in the 1990s. Clearly there were other titles of profound influence: Infinite Jest prognostically anticipated the ubiquitously commercialized future. The Things They Carried looked backwards—and prognostically forwards—at the timeless experiences of soldiers at war.  But one event on August 6, 1991 shredded everything. You’re reading this essay on the outgassed exhalations of that initial moment of ignition. That day, the World Wide Web appeared with its first publicly facing page, offering the potential for a million monkeys to write neo-Shakespearean verse.  

The expression “fast forward”  ironically recalls an analogue world of magnetic tape spinning on spindles. Now it’s a cute anachronism. Therefore, fast forward to today and recall my earlier charge to consider minutes not seconds. Today’s influencers provoke us to engage with information at the metaphorically atomic scale. Largely gone from the day-to-day national dialogue are long-form magazine articles. It’s true that long form essays still appear online and in the quaint printed pages of The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Sunday New York Times, and a handful of others. But those print pages are essentially dead sheafs of tree pulp (sad), and their online versions do not have the same cultural influence they may have had in decades past.  They may be sharable, and thus easier to share (I mean, obviously), but I do not believe that broader cultural dialogue hangs on modern “sharables” in the same ways that millions of people used to wait for the latest cover stories in Time or Newsweek.  

Airport lounges present fewer book covers facing opposing chairs than ever before, replaced with the anodyne backs of cell phones held by slack jawed travelers lost in endless scrolls. Movies themselves have been relegated to last-option slouch sessions on couches, often broken up by refrigerator raids and distracting images on second screens competing for attention. Music these days is…strange. Songs appear in endless streams and playlists, separated from albums, floating adjacent to the artists themselves. To paraphrase a song in the Wizard of Oz, “Click-click here, click-click there, and a couple of tra-la-las…that’s how we move our thumbs all day….!”

What’s constant, as usual, is change. Nobody gets wildly excited about tulip bulbs anymore, but clearly people still get excited about all sorts of other stuff. Excitement does not equate to influence, however. What captures my attention and makes me worry is that the influence invested by simply the constant pursuit of stimulation has largely supplanted any actual influence from creative work. Influencers have become their own source material, rather than the source material influencing new creators. There are no longer movies in common cultural conversation, no novels that everyone can cite, precious few collective moments that remind us we’re not alone. As if to amplify this point, it’s worth noting that the trend continues to accelerate. As culture becomes more and more self-cannabalizing, we’re just about to usher in artificial intelligence to supercharge the recursive process. Soon even our own sharables will become synthetic creations of soulless systems. 

In other words, après vous, le déluge. 

@michaelstarobin

facebook.com/michaelstarobin

[inventedworld]

THE SAVAGE ARTS

Except for those things done solo, creative enterprises are often condensations of oppression. 

Think that’s nuts?

The Benin Bronzes exemplify a raging debate about worst parts of cultural appropriation. They’re housed in the British Museum as artifacts obtained by murderous plunder after a long history of colonial occupation. They should be returned to Nigeria, one argument goes, as a form of repatriation of cultural identity, stolen goods returned to their rightful owners. (The Bronzes come from The Kingdom of Benin, which is now part of Edo State in Nigeria.)

But who, really, are the owners? The ethically dubious government currently in charge of Edo State? The aging— and also corrupt—hegemonic leader of a Benin tribal group who claims royal family ownership of those artifacts? A regional museum in Benin that’s unlikely to preserve, let alone properly display these rare artifacts? A major new museum scheduled to open this fall that wants to be seen as the proper steward for these artifacts?

The Brits assert that under their care the Bronzes at least have a chance to be protected, displayed, appreciated by diverse audiences, and not disappear into private collections of shady repute. That’s not bad, but it’s still not adequate. The British Museum’s reasonable sounding justification cannot be a morality cloak for the history by which they acquired these pieces. Unfortunately the other options about a lasting home of these artifacts do not feel adequate either. 

I’m digressing from my initial assertion, but not by much. The real problem here is that I have no idea how to resolve this ethical conundrum, or the many similar examples of improper cultural claims around the world. 

Let’s go back and review the initial charge: creative enterprises are condensations of oppression. The Benin Bronzes aren’t actually bronze. Most of them are actually made of brass, created as an indirect product of malevolent behavior on the part of the royal families that enabled their creation. Benin royalty earned its wealth largely by selling its own people into slavery, essentially amplifying the already barbaric tendencies promulgated by European powers at the time to sell people at auction. Slavery makes money, however, and some of the resources that historically accrued to The Kingdom of Benin contributed to the creation of these pieces. They were commissioned as elements of decor, and in some cases family memorials for the ruling class. In short, there are no “good guys” in this tale, even as the artworks at the center of the story present an extraordinary record of culture, craftsmanship, and history: condensations of oppression.

But what of creative enterprises that don’t describe traditional “arts”? Consider modern products of industry. Nineteenth and early twentieth century railroads were built by underpaid workers, often in dangerous conditions, often without recourse for proper treatment. Same goes for the wage serfs in modern food manufacturing companies, or garment factories, or even a thick slice of contemporary cube-farm employees in air conditioned spaces. Sure, the relative comfort of working in downtown Indianapolis office space is profoundly better than a coal miner’s stooped and carbon-dusted existence, but the underlying paucity of worker agency remains a fundamental reality of capital influence. Ask any crew on a movie shoot to describe their working conditions. Even under the best production leadership it’s often a gladiator’s life. Wake, work like draft horses, wait, work some more, worry about getting the next gig, wait, then rush back to the arena before sunrise if fortunate enough to get a call. You can count on long hours and limited influence. You can count on endless tasks and sudden changes. You can count on not being able to predict your own schedule, which inevitably presents intense challenges for pursuing your own life goals. Yes, it beats indentured servitude, but the glamour of working in movies dissipates fast. Stars and producers get the lion’s share. If you work “below the line”, you’re a wage serf. The burden of employment becomes oppressive even as you clamor for the job.

There are other categories that hide in plain sight. Creative enterprises aimed at generating even the most compelling work can only emerge by co-opting other people who cannot marshal their own agency. 

Don’t roll your eyes. I’m not immune to the immediate, rising din from readers who claim that work should be celebrated rather than excoriated when made possible by leaders brave enough to spearhead creative initiatives. The inevitable continuation of that thought is that teams of working people are not necessarily oppressed: they are employed. 

Okay: true. To echo my lament about the Benin Bronzes, I don’t have a better framework to offer. To be transparent, at times I also willingly work for people on a range of creative enterprises, while at other times I employee people to help me achieve my own visions, such as they may be. But what I try never to forget in either scenario is that to do anything requiring more than my own two hands demands that other people subvert their own needs. Taken to an extreme —the creation of The Bronzes, for example—means that the efforts themselves inevitably discount the value of most of the participants. Payment for labor does not singularly exonerate the person who’s paying from treating workers well. It’s a start, but it’s hardly an end.

Writers or painters or textile artists working alone in their own private spaces present alternatives. We are inevitably moved by creative works of those who expertly ply their craft all by themselves. But if you want to build a bridge or run a restaurant or make a movie you need a crew, and that means you need a means of organization and control. 

You’re still chafing about this. (I just know.) You’re reading and thinking, “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course a big project requires lots of people to get it done, and that doesn’t automatically make it oppressive!” 

I think it does, but I’ll offer a subtle nuance to that charge. It doesn’t necessarily make YOU oppressive, at least in terms of your intentions. (Perhaps you ARE oppressive, but that’s another matter entirely.) But I don’t believe we should pretend. If the goal for a team of people is to create something, anything, with high standards, then there is automatically a savage intensity that accrues to the effort. It may be the best system we have—it may be the most efficient way to coordinate the requisite labor and skills to accomplish anything beyond the work of an individual alone—but just because there isn’t a better solution doesn’t mean there are no lessons to learn, or big thoughts to keep in mind.

Take it in steps: start with a job that only requires yourself. If you simply want to get a it done, you can choose to metaphorically phone it in or use some sort of pre-existing template. Of course, you can’t be surprised if nobody comes back to you for repeat business, or if your name and your work gets forgotten amid the swirling sands of time. Mediocrity rarely deserves much attention or memory. 

But if you actually care about what you make, requirements rise quickly. You either fight like mad to bring your idea to glittering, glowing life, or you wind up settling for something less. Fighting like mad for your own highest standards does not guarantee success (not at all!), but success rarely comes from anything less than than enormous commitment.

Now, let’s add the necessity of other people working on your project. If your goals are high, and you determine to fight like mad, and you must employ others, you’re going to lean on them to give you as much as they’ll endure. Your carrot is their paycheck. Your stick is a constant reminder that there are plenty of other people salivating for their carrot. 

The savage intensity required in the pursuit of excellence does not enable short-cuts or sub-standard results. Labor will be paid, but not if the work doesn’t meet your standards. That’s reasonable on its face, but again, it’s hardly sufficient. It’s always in the hands of employers to determine how labor will be treated. Expressions of humanity will always be asymmetrically skewed toward the creative leads. The higher the standards, the more likely that worker conditions will erode.

Along the way to getting a job past its checkered flag, many people settle for something less than creative apotheosis. That’s no crime. But if you aspire to make something beyond the ordinary, don’t fool yourself that mere adequacy will make your efforts eternal. The things history remembers are rare and precious and worthy of note precisely because someone cared to make them matter. “Savage” therefore connotes an imperative of action, a singularity of intention that is not easily governed or mitigated by intruding thoughts or strategies. “Savage” means capturing other people, either by chains, by salaries, or by charismatic force of will. Capture methods can be ethical, such as attracting people with decent wages and good health benefits and PTO, or capture can be oppressive and dehumanizing, like western companies and consumers look askance while Congolese workers dig up rare earth minerals in horrific conditions so that we can light up our fancy cell phones. The first version is, obviously, far better in terms of quality of life for those who receive dental benefits and fifteen paid days off. But taken to logical conclusions, people in power determine the rules, and workers delivering the labor must adapt to circumstances. 

Let’s go back to The Benin Bronzes. These artifacts describe condensations of labor. They also describe usurpations of autonomy and ownership, and disingenuous declarations of cultural preservation on the part of those who initially ordered their creation, not to mention  those who seek to retain them going forward. I’m glad they’re safe in the British Museum, and I’m sad they’re safe in the British Museum. Neither are good options, in similar ways that that wage servitude is simultaneously no way to live and also a legitimate, often honorable means for making a living. 

For creators, the take-home message carries a charge of responsibility. We must be honest about all of this. We must be honest with ourselves, and we must commit to being fair and reasonable with those who work for us. At no point should any leader ask for less than excellence, presuming excellence happens to be the goal. (It generally is for me.) But the corrosive power inherent in marshaling others to do things we cannot do by ourselves always threatens to erode the bonds of civility and respect. Without a foreground dialogue about agency and ownership, the artifacts of culture will always carry the scent of sweat and tears, no matter how well they’re polished. 

@michaelstarobin

facebook.com/1auglobalmedia

[inventedworld]

OPENING CEREMONIES, DECONSTRUCTED

Were those Parisian Olympic opening ceremonies a big Gallic bust?

Au contraire, mon frère! 

The character of the faceless, costumed runner traversing Parisian streets had some critics suggesting a colossal mistake, a dark image that added somber, bleak overtones at a time traditionally designed for celebration. I would like to offer another view. From a dramatic perspective, that faceless character represented all of us as we collectively navigate dark days. That faceless character, effectively a modern knight hustling through 21st century spaces, dodged the same metaphoric perils each of us confront every single day. We confront the city; we confront transit itself; we confront each other, often a source of approbation if not —sad to say--outright threat. We have spoiled much of the natural world around us; we have threatened our futures; we have corrupted many of the positive values that cultures around the world purport to support. It is rare for any of us NOT to perceive a sense of implicit or explicit peril nipping at our heels. Darkness stalks the world, represented by the urban flight of our dramatic, fleet footed knight, and it could only be through manipulative corporate marketing or sad self-delusion to think anything else these days. Humanity has cast shadow upon itself. 

But back to the show! 

The knight emerged at the grand Place du Trocadero and delivered the Olympic colors after a harrowing journey. In fact, because the knight had succeeded in his task, the character became a heroic one, and the presentation of the Olympic flag itself became a spark of arrival. As befitting the traditional Olympic narrative, that spark effectively ignited a few moments later with the arrival of the torch, which then went on to kindle the Olympic flame.  Ceremony organizers re-imagined a bit of dramatic French history with their 2024 flame, harkening back to a stunning demonstration in 1783 when two brothers launched a huge paper and silk balloon, a first-of-its-kind beacon signaling humanity’s ability to overcome the force of gravity. This years’s Olympic flame hovers in mid-air above Paris, suggesting a 21st beacon of hope as well as wonder.

Fragmented into scenic vignettes along the Seine, this year’s opening ceremony lacked a certain cohesion typically afforded by experiences tied to singular locations like arenas and theaters. But in transformation there is also opportunity. Visitors in situ experienced a living theater, a Paris brought to surreal, heightened life. Visitors around the globe—an exponentially larger audience—experienced a kaleidoscope of locales, of tonal shifts, of theatrical expressions, all tied together by a thematic idea.

I know, I know, the whole “Last Supper” kerfuffle provoked ferocious shouts from many corners and conversations. I understand, and even respect, that these are concerns we should neither dismiss nor ignore.  But if you’re reading this, you’ll have to tolerate my take. Relax. Was it a bad choice? Probably. Was it so offensive that it demanded we dismiss the energetic list of other vigorous, sensitive, smart, inventive moments? I don’t think so. Criticism is fair, especially in a public forum, and some ideas rightly deserve more criticism than others. But if there’s one thing the 2020s should be teaching us all it’s that everyone needs to find a little more patience tolerating a range of ideas. Doesn’t mean you have to love everything, but it does mean that critical outrage needs to be scaled proportionally. Otherwise, we collectively risk missing the whole stage play when it’s only one or two scenes worthy of dismissive eye rolls. 

Big art of all types is inherently perilous. It almost always requires enormous expense and unusual forbearance of its benefactors. Big art often has to appeal to widely different sensibilities in a vastly heterogenous audience. With hundreds of thousands of viewers located at sites throughout Paris and  billions more watching on various screens around the world it’s hard to make something  simultaneously accessible and compelling without losing an authentic sense of soul. The French opening ceremonies dared to deconstruct more than 120 years of Olympic tradition. By scattering the show around the city with a sinewy thread of river holding it together, the creative team took huge risks. In fact, it was this daring deconstruction that enabled a re-imagination of the entire narrative.  Even weighed down with the bloat of massive multi-national corporate interests, the opening ceremonies embodied the best part of boundary-pushing theatrical sensibilities. This was “big art” for a global audience with boundless ambition.

Yes, there were missteps. Yes, there were some ill considered choices, aesthetically, technically, and narratively. I rolled my eyes at a few of them with amusement and let most of them roll off my back at the same time. But ultimately I must applaud vigorously. With the risks of spicy big art being reduced by commercial tendencies into a tasteless pablum, this particular show asked a global audience to stretch. There were laughs. There were moments of soaring emotion, there was drama, there were duds. Considering alternative human expressions of entirely bleaker, more depressing, more dehumanizing sorts basically everywhere, it was pleasing to see the creative community holding up better reasons to be together.

One more note. For all of the artistic daring and inventive energy, we should not skip lauding one of the most extraordinary aspects of the entire four hour show. Hiding in plain sight was the astoundingly complex electronic production teams that actually captured events in real-time and then delivered it all as a live tableau to a waiting world. The planning, the engineering, the sheer creative brio to figure it all out, keep dozens of camera in sharp focus, capture good audio, transmit signals, sync it all up, switch, switch, switch a million graphics, and keep us all in the story, boggles the mind. I would gladly wash dishes at a fine French restaurant for three days straight if I could meet that production team and get a tour of the broadcast center!

@michaelstarobin

facebook.com/1auglobalmedia

[inventedworld]

A DOCUMENT TRAVELS THROUGH TIME

While doing some re-organizing, my wife recently opened a book that hasn’t moved for years since it was placed on its shelf.  Inside she discovered a piece of paper that my mother had apparently folded between its pages 40 years prior. Scrawled on this thin time capsule, including a hastily scribed date at the top corner, there are notes. We pour over them like runes found at an archaeological site.  Some are amusing, some simply mysterious, some irrelevant. Some are illegible. None of them amount to very much, yet no matter how we discuss and consider and laugh and ruminate about what’s there, that page of handwritten script becomes almost impossible to discard. It has a crease down the middle and it’s smudged, with a ragged edge where it was apparently torn from a spiral note pad. It has a little doodle of bulbous leaves on a vine that often found its way into the margins of her pages. It contains no real meaning, no information of any discernible value, save for one thing. It is a physical link to the past. It is a tangible artifact, proving that things happened decades ago. It means nothing, and yet it strangely means everything.

Was it placed in those pages as a hasty bookmark? Does it amount to a jotted collection of notes not to forget, inadvertently lost to approaching decades when the phone rang, or she had to leave for work, or my sister or I burst through the door after school? There are no clues to clarify these mysteries. My mother cannot recall either; it’s just a page of random scribblings with a smattering of words and loopy doodles that don’t amount to much. 

Intellectually I realize that events of all sorts happened in the past. Events of the past shape our endlessly evolving present. Like all of us, my mother jotted professional notes, scrawled grocery lists, scribbled phone numbers, and captured thoughts she wanted to recall later. Of course, she also wrote more substantial things beyond this largely unintelligible page. Like billions of other people she produced expressions of influence at different times and for different purposes with varying degrees of meaning and feeling and sentimental value and critical importance, some profound, some less so.

That’s why this scrap of paper and ink captures my imagination. Here’s an encapsulation of an ordinary moment, apparently compiled in haste or in an incremental process of additive notation. Its relative vacuity describes the majority of our lives, the big masses of interstitial goo that hold our more substantial bones together. Most of our days do not concern works of creative flight. Most of our days are about getting the laundry folded, and dreaming about works of creative flight we’d like to be doing instead.

That’s also why this document, previously lost to anonymous pages of a forgotten book, transported through time without explanation, matters to me. It reminds me that most of the stuff we create in our fleeting years on Earth are probably more akin to this scrap of memory than anything genuinely memorable or substantive. Collectively we all remember the polished and refined stuff.  But where our best creative works are usually efforts of deliberate intention, they only represent a small portion of the expended creative energy we all use to get us from day to day. 

On the right side of that page, her doodled leaves suggest that she was thinking about or listening to something else while she was holding her pen. I imagine that something else was happening simultaneously, an automated hold-message on the phone, or a moment marking time while waiting for someone in the house to return to an interrupted conversation. The specifics of those experiences are now lost to time, but the scribbled, recorded evidence of those ordinary moments, captured like a mote in amber, provokes me to ponder the origin of any lasting idea.

@michaelstarobin

facebook.com/1auglobalmedia

[inventedworld]

FREE SPIRITS

How many boxes of cereal does a thinking society really need? Just standing in front of a row of cereal boxes in an ordinary grocery store is to face a wall of information that would have paralyzed a 15th century serf.

Supply side economists would argue that the question is misplaced, that the total number of cereal choices gets determined by the immutable laws of supply and demand, that the marketplace is always right, and that motley choices are the sign of success. I think that’s all missing the point (which is probably why I’m not an economist.)

Free spirits do not always seek more choices. There’s something of a burden inherent in a million choices. Many free spirits will be perfectly content to eat the same plain yogurt and strawberries for breakfast most every day for the rest of their lives. Being a free spirit is about something beyond having endless choices, or simply doing whatever, whenever.

The whole concept of being “free” (of spirit) suggests that a person is not overly stressed by things that others might regard as limiting. Being a free spirit does not imply that a person wants to abandon berries in favor of something more daring for breakfast. Being free means that endless choices are not in themselves the thing to pursue in the first place.

On the surface a free spirit suggests an artistic proclivity, an ability not to get bogged down in the kind of trivia that could curtail freedom of intellectual and sensual expression in people less free of spirit. I think this is true to a point, but all of that freedom also presents a challenge.

Free spirits may be unencumbered and thus uninhibited, but without some conscious effort, that can be a fast track to being undisciplined, too. The limitations of an internal inhibitions are the mechanical linkages that facilitate decisiveness and clarity. Free spirits may feel the flexibility to feel and respond to the world with an enviable ease, but all of that potential malleability sometimes comes at the cost of focus, and there is never anything substantially creative that comes without a measure of intense focus. Let me put it in terms more purple: a constant exchange of lovers often leads to emotional ennui. Intimacies among many undermines the potential for deeper intimacies among a few.

Creative enterprises thrive on freedom, but too much freedom—an endless quantity of choices, opportunities, or time—does not make for better work. That said, free spirits are rare, and their innate ability to live without encumbrances entrances and entices. It’s their openness to the world that makes us look on longingly. Every creative person I know wishes wishes he or she could be untroubled, free to feel and free to act. Acts of creation are, after all, about action. In the nexus between infinite freedom and resolute limitations lie the potential for living a life that matters.

@michaelstarobin     or       facebook.com/1auglobalmedia

[inventedworld]

THE RECURSIVE PROBLEM WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Welcome human readers! 

As much as the AI conversation has focused on complex matters relating to authorship, ownership, cybernetic hallucinations, deep fakes, and whether an idea can be considered relevant if there isn’t direct human involvement, I feel like I’m distracted. These practical AI questions may be vital, but they only circumscribe the deeper, more meaningful cultural questions. Consider this: in an AI-influenced world, what are the implications for how individuals and cultures interact with creative works of any kind? When non-human actors —artificial intelligence, in other words—can materially shape both the substance and style of what we consume, it’s critical to ask if the ghost in the machine is now out of the machine, walking around.

There’s no debate that AI will have profound benefits to society. I absolutely believe that, once perfected, smart cars will do a much better job on the roads than sleep-deprived, preoccupied drivers. I much prefer the prospect of always astute AI radiologists as compared to potentially distracted humans who might miss something subtle on a scan. But data analysis is one thing; soul is another. What I worry about concerns how AI will  shape the recursive process of creative development that’s been humanity’s foundational engine for millennia. Until this moment in human history, creative development of all types has always been fundamentally recursive. Tomorrow’s creative idea emerges from the raw materials mined yesterday. The implications of breaking that truism present profoundly worrisome considerations. By digesting massive libraries for raw informational fuel, AI may superficially ground its creative efforts in older works. But separated from the cultural and personal fermentation that comes from emotional and intellectual encounters with new creative works, I’m not sure the process is equivalent. Proponents will say that AIs trained on existing libraries will simply benefit from creative legacies. My concern is that after a while this process begins to eat itself, as future AI results start to derive from libraries built of AI. Think of it this way. A photocopy of a photocopy looks pretty good in the modern world. But run that process through the machine a hundred times, you’ll begin to spot artifacts and imperfections that deny its authenticity as compared to the original.

There’s been plenty written about AI recently, including an ironic percentage that’s been written without much human influence beyond the prompt itself. It’s a simple truth: our new electronic tools have begun to change a vast range of how we live our lives in the modern world. 

A scientist always believes he or she can control the creature created in the lab. I marvel at the billions of venture capital dollars rushing into the hands of sleepless engineers racing to create technologies that will arguably do away with a big portion of their own jobs. I’m not opposed to modernity or the soul of a new machine. I fully embrace the inevitable process where innovation forces new ways of working that are destined to replace older modes. My specific concern is that the embrace of AI’s siren promise for innovation seems uncaring about its implications while simultaneously acting as a transformational agent. 

One way to address some of these concerns is to side-step the obvious questions. Rather than wonder if artificially generated content has inherent value—a seemingly Buddhist koan — it’s valuable to reconsider matters of cultural determinism. Here’s an example:

Not long from now AI services will be built into various audio-visual playback devices—televisions, tablets, electronic billboards, etc. This means that matters of content selection will be outsourced to machines. In service of black-box algorithms, likely refined recursively by non-human actors, what happens when images or words deemed to be objectionable are modified on the fly?  While streaming a television program or movie, you would never know that original content had been modified from its original forms. Curse words might be less salty. Political rhetoric could be smoothed out or modified to appease censors of various stripes. Instead of seeing a nude body, actors might appear draped in some sort of computer generated clothing or scrim or curtain or shadow. Or, perhaps, a subjectively objectionable scene could simply be excised altogether—edited out in real time! The challenges of artificial intelligence interfering with creative intentions are not only profound in terms of their Orwellian implications, but profound in terms of what that means for the future growth of culture. The more we allow an outsourcing of our own censorship, effectively shielding our eyes before we even have a chance to discover or explore our own feelings about an idea, the more we outsource our values and morals. Taken only a few steps further, when our creative inputs are constrained by systems that make choices in loco parentis, we replace recursive creativity with recursive repression. 

This is the equivalent of a cultural bank run. The more culture abrogates its own inventive abilities or aesthetic choices, the more it tamps down sparks of invention or aesthetic exploration. It’s not hard to imagine a moment when people who consciously choose to eschew electronic means for accomplishing new creative works will be regarded as second class creatives. At extremes, they could be regarded as heretics, as apostates of modernity. The profound irony in this example is that those cast to the edges would be the very people trying hard to hold the center, the best parts of humanity.

Fortunately we’re not there yet, but this stuff is coming fast. Millions of users are adopting these technologies looking for quick payoffs without considering the long term implications. I’m not saying all AI is bad, just like I’m not saying all cars are bad. But I am suggesting that technical potentials without a measure of reasonable forethought seems like a recipe for a crash.

@michaelstarobin

facebook.com/1auglobalmedia

[inventedworld]

WHAT, ME WORRY?

I’m not worried.

Well, I’m worried a little bit, if you really want to know, but not deeply.

Every time a new generation of cell phone comes out, the cameras improve. Editing software improves, processing power improves, computational photographic algorithms improve. You can now essentially pre-set your camera with different moods depending on the kind of photo you’re trying to capture. Want a cool desaturated look to suggest casual ennui? Tap, slide, shoot, done. Want an edgy chiaroscuro that halos a light behind a silhouetted head? There’s a pre-set for that.

Lots of people keep buying this gear. Some even mess with the tools and try it out, flooding social media channels with their clever photo experiments. But even among those who freak to geek on this stuff, it’s not likely that they’re going to eat my lunch anytime soon.

When typewriters became commonly available, the ubiquity of books bloomed like spring. When word processors showed up, June started bustin’ out all over. The tools themselves democratized the activity, and a crowd of new voices appeared who might never have considered putting words in logical order before. The total number of words flowing out into the world turned into a torrent. Ease of use amplified total use.

That’s the history of cameras too, going back to the earliest incarnations of easily changeable film all the way up to the latest mega-pixel amazements on the market. Photos flood every imaginable surface now. To millions of people, carefully manicured media are more common than sights of the natural world.

Here’s what hasn’t changed with the ubiquity of it all this tech: quality. It’s hard to be good, and being good is usually a function of discipline and hard work.

And that, my friend, is why I’m not desperately worried.

It used to be that anyone who could run a four minute mile was a superstar. It’s now something that precocious high schoolers can apparently achieve.

But evidence of ability does not imply evidence of ubiquity. The speedy teen hardly describes the new normal. It’s true there have been hundreds before him, but it’s still rare. Running also used to be something people did only when we were being chased by tigers or playing in the park. It’s now something people simply do, which means there’s a better chance those greater numbers would promote a roadrunner.

It’s similar with contemporary creative work. Proletariat access to powerful tools certainly enables millions of people to do billions of artistic experiments that otherwise would have been unavailable. It’s inevitable that amid those huge numbers there would  simply be a statistical chance of more good work being done. It’s the same principle as the theoretical view that life on other planets must exist: the numbers are simply too large to presume otherwise. It’s the same as giving and infinite number of monkeys and infinite amount of time and winding up with the works of Shakespeare.

But proportionate to the overall population, excellence is still rare. Talent? Sure, there’s lots of that. But excellence is something else. Talent matters, of course. Some people are born faster than others. That sub-four runner clearly has the biological hardware that makes it possible for him to light the track on fire. But talent alone is like simply having access to cool tools: access without practice does not independently confer greatness.  Discipline and repeated effort are much more vital, and those are traits that most people are unwilling to invest in adequate measure to rise above the masses.

I love to cook. Because I love to cook, I enjoy working in a great kitchen. But if all I have is a pan, a knife, a cutting board, and a source of heat, I’m confident I can make something you’re going to want to eat. The tools don’t make supper. That’s up to the person doing the cooking. Quality gets a boost from the tools at hand, but quality gets a much more profound boost if the hands doing the hard work have spent time honing their craft.

The challenge now is that because the tools are so powerful, we face a signal to noise differential so asymmetrical that the whole conversation about excellence must changed. With so much stuff out there—so many books and websites and photographs and more—it’s challenging for excellence to stand out among the clamorous throng. Good work is everywhere. But excellence? That’s still reserved for those willing to put in the work. Perhaps the real conversation should concern the following: Does excellence matter anymore if there’s simply so much good stuff available!

That question intensely vexes me. I worry that in an ocean of “not bad at all!”, the collective tools for even recognizing and encouraging excellence begin to lose their buoyancy. When “perfectly useful” supplants the search for the sublime, I wonder about what we miss simply because capabilities for discernment and perception have been swept up by the tide.

@michaelstarobin

facebook.com/1auglobalmedia

[inventedworld]

CAMERA VS CAMERA: HOW TO SEE

Everyone’s a photographer these days. You have a camera in your phone, and a surprisingly good one, too. You use it, naturally, to make photographs.  When you do, you’re a photographer.

Immediately this blog could be hijacked by the semantic police, pressing the case that just by giving someone a descriptive name does not automatically confer upon them matching abilities or rank. If you ask me to sing, you’ll likely rush to cover your ears. Then you’ll immediately agree that even if I were granted the title I’m not worthy of being called a singer. 

Suffice to say, I’m not entering that debate today. For our immediate purposes let’s just call everyone who uses a camera a photographer: one who makes photographs. 

I like my phone camera. It’s always with me, and I use it for snapshots and occasional selfies and travel photos to remind me of adventures both ordinary and extraordinary. It’s plenty capable of enabling me to capture an image without a lot of thought. It even enables me to experiment and try creative things quickly and easily. Why then would I ever use a big, heavy, and expensive camera when the sleek little thing in my pocket is often just fine?

I use a “real” camera instead of a phone camera for the following reasons.

1) It focuses my attention. With a phone camera I find myself relying on the gadget to make choices—lighting, focus, easily accessed pre-loaded settings—basic stuff that I would otherwise be forced to think through by using a single-purpose device. The intentionality demanded when I work with a dedicated camera encourages me to pursue an idea with greater probity or polish than I otherwise might with a point ’n shoot phone.

2) It only takes photos. It doesn’t text; it doesn’t help me buy sneakers; it doesn’t give me the DC metro schedule. Because a dedicated camera is only designed to make photographs, I’m less likely to be distracted by all of the other things popping up on my screen. It’s true that even when I use a “real” camera my cell phone doesn’t stop buzzing, chirping, vying for my attention, pestering me to poke its glowing screen, but at least it’s literally compartmentalized in my pocket from the image I’m trying to resolve in the viewfinder.

3) It forces me to think about technical things to achieve non-technical goals. While many dedicated cameras now have massive technological muscle, jacked up with extraordinary software and engineering smarts, I generally prefer to shoot in manual modes as much as possible when I use a dedicated camera.  That forces me to think about where I place my focus, where to place my feet relative to my subject, whether to use a polarizing filter or a long exposure or a tripod or any of a million other details. In so doing, I’m fully invested in the moment. 

Here’s the irony of all this: I really don’t care very much about what hardware I use. Sure, I like fancy camera gear, and yes, I can geek out with the geekiest. Ultimately, however, my geek gene only holds my interest for short stretches of time. What I really care about is what I see and what I can imagine. The technical processes to capture a photograph is only interesting insofar as it helps overcome the necessary friction of the act. Good tools are simply mechanisms to help me achieve something more important.

As a dichotomy, tools matter and tools don’t matter at the same time. Give a great photographer a cheap, disposable film camera you can still buy at the drug store (I love ‘em, actually) and you’re likely going to get something interesting. Give my neighbor a camera bag filled with expensive gear, and you’re going to get backlit cat photos on the windowsill…and a bag full of expensive gear. 

Which is why I’m ending where I began: the cell phone camera. Access to tools is always more vital than access to great tools. My neighbor might become a great photographer using just his cell phone. If he wants to, he can practice, practice, practice with it, learn all sorts of stuff, do all sorts of experiments. By diving in, he can discover how to make photographs that resonate, that communicate, that move people. He can become an artist with his cell phone camera—there are no limitations. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit  that there are already brilliant cell phone photographers in the world, easily capable of rivaling the best work from people who use all sorts of fancy stuff.

But maybe none of that is particularly interesting to him. Maybe the photographic goal in his soul is little more than selfies and snapshots and pictures of cats on windowsills…and that’s totally fine by me if that’s enough for him.  Not everyone can be, nor should be, an artist. 

Tools will confer limits, of course. Tools shape the work. Artists, conversely, operate the tools. While an artist with a mediocre tools may not be able to do everything he or she wants to do, an artist is not at all restricted from thinking creatively about what he or she can do with the tools at their disposal. Tools should serve the pursuits of ideas. They should not be the arbiters of what’s creatively possible. Whether we’re professional photographers or occasional snapshot-takers at the park, the moment we abdicate our creative choices to the dictates of our tools is the moment the ghost in the machine has taken over.

@michaelstarobin

facebook.com/1auglobalmedia

[inventedworld]

MECHANISMS

The story goes that Jack Kerouac taped multiple sheets of typing paper into one ridiculously long page so that he could sit at the typewriter and pound out “On the Road” without having to break his train of thought by swapping pages. The image of this process has an intangible influence on my memories of reading of the book. It feels metaphorically resonant, even if the act of doing it isn’t directly related to the story. 

I think part of that resonance has to do with being a writer myself. I can’t help but always be attracted to hearing stories about how writers pursue their craft. I like hearing if they write in long hand, sitting in coffee shops, use ancient Olivettis, or scribble 1000 notecards in pencil only to shuffle the deck until a narrative structure emerges. (That last one never made sense to me, but I’m not here to judge.)

As a photographer I can’t help but be curious about how particular images were made, too. Long lens? Polarizing filter? Large format sensor…or perhaps it was actually captured with film? (Imagine that!) Insight into the artist’s process inevitably influences the way I digest his or her work, even as I try to distance myself from the artist’s process in order to absorb the spirit and substance of what he or she was trying to say.

Orson Welles called this phenomenon, “the ghost of the clapper boy”. The term may be a little sexist in contemporary terms, and certainly dated with regard to the technology, but what he’s referring to matters for all time. Wells opined that it was impossible for him to watch a movie late in his career without being conscious of the fact that just off screen had to be a  crew member holding a film clapper. That’s the mechanical slate production crews use to mark the start of a scene so film editors and sound technicians can sync up moving pictures with matching audio. Wells’s self-awareness here was that he couldn’t simply watch a film on its own terms. Since a movie demanded the inevitable labor of many hands, and since he was also a highly skilled leader of crews who made movies, it was hard for him to see a movie without also perceiving the practicalities of the many hands that made it.

This can be a trap for many people working on creative projects. In these pages, I’ve certainly discussed the deceptive siren song of specialized tools. They can often enable creative efforts but they can also act as hobbling impediments for the best intentions by creating unnecessary distractions or complexity. Endless pursuit of the perfect tool with a perfected set of skills can get in the way of actually doing good work. Make something, and your skills will automatically improve simply by using them. Constant evaluation of artistic processes other people may have employed can similarly impede our ability to actually see what those artists are trying to do creatively. We can get distracted by our evaluations of how they’re doing what they’re doing, when the real point is to do the opposite.

It’s essential that creative people of all stripes make it a regular habit to critically evaluate the works of other creative people. We gain inspiration; we gain ideas; we maintain a broader  cultural dialogue so that our own work doesn’t live in isolation. In so doing, it’s inevitable that we’ll wonder what kind of brush a painter used, or if a musician recorded all of her band’s song parts independently or as a group. Equally important, however, is the vitality of trying to compartmentalize the “how” from the “why”  our creative consumption. Before we evaluate mechanical processes, we need to be sure we always ask ourselves, “Does the overall work have anything to say?” Come to think of it, that’s a good question to keep in the front of mind  in our own work, too. 

@michaelstarobin

facebook.com/1auglobalmedia