Industry & Art
After last week's talk about the placebo effect and illusory experiences, I wanted to check in on the guy in the placebo effect video. He lost his job. I think that's kind of funny, though a little grim. I've been brainstorming how to do this journal differently — I've decided to make it more open-ended and interconnected, as that's the key theme of this course. That's why I'm making it a virtual word-cloud-like system where the user can drift around a space and read from above in different sections. If all goes well, you should also be able to search and see where words are mentioned as well.
The key theme this week is the industrial revolution's effect on the arts and the perception of the world. My high school's arts program was very different from other public schools, apparently (as a lot of kids said they never learnt about these things, while I did) — so that's not only good for me, but also an interesting thing to note about how these ideas not being taught to so many people might have a negative effect on wider society.
In my notes I was mostly writing down quotes. I felt like a lot of ideas I've had were being articulated when I've never known how to. The cult of technology to overpower nature referred me back to older sci-fi, like Evangelion. But something stuck out: David Shea made a pretty big mistake. In talking about the 60s, he said the Earth photo was 'just that' and started having people change their minds about the environment. Not only were environmental movements popular already at the time. But that's not true when it comes to that being the photo — the photo originally had America at the bottom. The press was forced to flip it around by the White House. I think it was a mistake to say 'just that' about anything, especially with the new age of neo-futurists in Silicon Valley devaluing art. The previous two tutorials made it very clear about interconnection of culture and technology, so why be reductive about how society effects these concepts? Especially as later in Week 12 we talk about how advertisement and propaganda shape and inflate the value of capital around objects — wouldn't flipping America's position be considered tweaking an advertisement so you don't accidentally praise your 'competitor'?
The ideas of the replacement of god were great as an interpretation of that cultural movement. The Olympia painting by Manet was something I didn't know before — incredibly beautiful. The evolution of the Burmese piano is also beautiful. It brings to mind reductionism as a colonial force by nature: previous ideas adapted and reshaped into whatever the cultural norms are. Maybe in a few hundred years, after we're all killed by nuclear bombs, the next civilisation will think our Labubus were cultural totems and our Starbucks were ceremonial waters. Maybe they aren't wrong, in a way.
Modern media seems to be moving back to this idea of god in the machine mentioned within the context of the plane inside the church — Evangelion is still super popular (a literal interpretation of machines made to kill angels in order to protect the mechanised body of Christ) and new brands like Warhammer and Trench Crusade have emerged, a manifestation of angels 'in the machine' and the art of this era thrust into a grim and gritty setting of the First World War.
The history of the Futurists and Dadaists was fascinating to properly learn in university instead of the surface-level look provided in high school. I already knew the masculine ideas of cultural revolution of the Futurists would eventually produce Mussolini and Hitler, but the extent of their nature and the link to an anti-history sentiment I was completely unaware of. Nowadays Futurists would be more often called accelerationists — akin to the 'pepe' movements on sites like 4Chan. The same ideas of grinding metal as the sound of the future, war as the great cleanser, ring very akin to current 'chad ideologies'. The same Futurist strongman agenda echoes through the 'looksmaxxers' who mutilate themselves for masculinity (such as 'clavicular' or other figures).
Another interpretation: modern Futurists are the conservative AI bros. They pillage art, try to reduce its value with bot farms creating hate comments under impressionist art, then propose AI — the purely machine — as a replacement. They propose they've killed god and replaced it with a machine, but fail to understand that the machine is still owned by a company in their perfect world. Walter Benjamin proposed the idea of aura as being inherent to the individuality of a piece of art. If there's a machine that replicates art ad infinitum, you don't need to burn it down to destroy the art.
Most of this lesson reminded me of Evangelion. David Shea, if you're reading this — watch Evangelion. Or at least the last two episodes of it. It's probably the closest thing to one of your lectures around.
Maybe we can't understand ourselves due to how we perceive. If we're aware that what we know isn't what is real, but have no way to affect that — is it really not real after all? The matrix would argue otherwise, but from an absurdist point of view, I'm not so sure. If no one can understand anything because, by observation, it changes, then we should, if our goal is to understand things, just give up — but we don't. That's an argument enough that being unable to understand is okay, and we need to be more comfortable in unknowing.
On the subject of unknowing — my parents actually did an artwork on the same idea that articulates this much better than I ever can in this rambling journal: