#4 Optimising for Art
This week: Art between Advertising | 40 years of the infinite game-verse | Exploring the Virtual Biennalle | The Synthetic Social Network | Jobs, jobs, jobs | Things to do
Art between advertising // Circa and a new art market
, Head of Global Foresight at Reddit and author of , is brilliant, and if you don’t read him on emergent trends from digital culture, you really really should.Look around
How much ad space could be used for art?…
We’re constantly optimising for ads.
But what does optimisation for art look like?
Here’s the kicker: they are not mutually exclusive.
Free idea: Advertisers can subsidise public (physical OOH and digital media) art where they would have once placed ads, and still get the brand credit.
Win win.
To me the big opportunity in Matt’s free idea is making this happen where we encounter a built environment evermore covered in screens - a key trend I talked about in Issue 2 around Sphere in Las Vegas.
The more architecture becomes a vessel for digital media, the more we have to find ways to get art in amongst the adverts - and the more interesting new value that comes from doing so.
The good news: there’s a deep history of creative innovation here to build on.
Creative R&D subscriber Sherry Dobbin is a key innovator in combining public art with what’s called media architecture, a discipline that looks set to explode as screen costs continue to lower - and as large scale digital content production costs driven by generative AI follow the same path.
Sherry’s work is a key example of optimising for art. Over a decade ago she turned the screen portfolio across New York’s Times Square into an amazing canvas for digital art.
The artists who’ve participated there is genuinely A-list - there’s a great resource on Google Arts and Culture capturing the first few years. You can read Sherry’s take on what it means here.
Times Square Arts, the entity that supports this is a non-profit that sits below the Times Square Alliance, the business improvement district that brought Times Square back to life in the 1990s. It’s a perfect example of philanthropic support for something big and ambitious at the point where art meets advertising.
But there are other ways.
In the UK, Circa - the Cultural Institute for Contemporary Radical Arts - has taken the lessons of Time Square Arts and built what they brilliantly describe as the #circaeconomy. Every night at 20:23, London’s Piccadilly Lights becomes a scene for art - and huge names from Ai WeiWei to Pussy Riot to the Dalai Lama have gone on screen.
Rather than philanthropic support, Circa has built a self-sustaining commercial model which hints at a scalable future for this approach. Every month, alongside a new digital work, Circa releases a limited edition set of prints by their featured artist - the money raised from the sales going back to help build what’s still a tiny start-up. Alongside individual prints you can buy an annual subscription. For £1000 per year it’s a great entry point into contemporary art collecting.
To me, what Circa asks is a bigger question riffing off
’s starter idea: How many more interventions art could make in advertising? Where? What new art markets could sustain them?Both Circa, a stop-and-stare moment at 8:23pm every night, and Times Square’s “midnight moments” imply that time-bound interventions are the way in.
But what form of commercial intervention could sustain and grow them so there is value for makers and media owners in doing it?
There seem three opportunities:
To join up the ecosystem of a fractured and fragmented commercial digital art market with these interventions
To make a meaningful business model - using the huge public reach of large-scale screen interventions to drive commercial art sales, whether at low cost as Circa have done, or in much higher-value market niches
To create more sustainable production costs for large scale digital content by integrating generative AI deeply into content workflows
Could that create the sustainable business model that supports sustained interventions with media owners and builds value for artists, dealers, content producers and the rest of the ecosystem?
It seems an area of promise, grounded in past success and making the screen-saturated world we’re facing better through art.
Get building! 👷🏻♀️👷🏽👷🏻♂️
Enjoying “Creative R&D”? // Help grow the community
We’re four weeks in now, with a community coming together of researchers, policy makers, funders, artists and technologists shaping tomorrow’s creativity - and those who want to find out about what they’re doing and what it means.
One of the things I’m noticing from the subscriber list is how we’re getting multiple subscribers from the same institutions - and there are lots of you out there in places that do Creative R&D for a living.
So to give you full access to the growing archive, I’ve created a special “Creative R&D Pioneers” group subscription offer with a big discount for readers coming from the same place. Available below…
Project of the Week // City X Venice Virtual Pavilion
Love to go the Venice Architecture Biennale?
WOULDN’T WE ALL?
Well, you don’t need to because the metaverse has your back.
Head over here to explore a parallel universe where Jean Nouvel-style jellyfish hover over Venice, each containing a selection of great content about the different pavilions.
It’s my project of the week not because I ❤️ it, but because “the metaverse” often seems an excuse to brush off the website stylings Steve Jobs personally kicked out of the internet when he stopped Apple iOS running Flash way back when. His letter about why remains a classic of design thinking.
While Steve curses us from the great beyond, i’d ignore the weird 3D interface and use the good old fashioned menu to dig in to some very interesting material on where architecture is heading.
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs // Merlin, DCMS, Serpentine, MiMA
Not one, not three … but five hot gigs at different ends of the ecosystem:
The Serpentine’s Arts Technologies programme, led by the brilliant Kay Watson, is the source of soooo much Creative R&D goodness. They’re looking for an Assistant Curator. A career-making role.
Meanwhile over at DCMS in Whitehall, Head Economist Harman Saggar is looking for an economic policy advisor to build on their important work defining the economic value of culture.
Beyond the arts, the impact of Creative R&D is also being felt in the attractions sector - Merlin, runner of theme parks everywhere, are looking for a Head of Creative Technology. VR rollercoasters? Yes, please!
Creative Technologists are the HOT job category right now. Pixel Artworks, currently filling the Outernet with a world of AR butterflies are looking for a Creative Technology Director.
The quiet reinvention of Middlesbrough’s MiMA by the brilliant Laura Sillars as not just a great and radical gallery but also the centre of a school of art and creativity is a story that needs telling. Help tell it by becoming Professor of Arts and Creative Industries.
Key Read // The Synthetic Social Network
The quote from Deep Mind founder Mustafa Suleyman I posted two weeks ago won’t get out of my head. His idea that we will quickly go from generative AI to a to-be-defined interactive AI with voice as its primary interface feels like a profound pointer into what tomorrow looks like.
BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
The beginnings of an answer are in this brilliant piece on the Verge which looks at the emerging use of AIs as “personas” on social networks.
A bot that gets to know your quirks; remembers your life history; offers you coaching or tutoring or therapy; entertains you in whichever way you prefer. A synthetic companion not unlike the real people you encounter during the day, only smarter, more patient, more empathetic, more available.
The article asks why people might want to spend time with artificial humans, but rightly notes this will
Those of us who are blessed to have many close friends and family members in our life may look down at tools like this, experiencing what they offer as a cloying simulacrum of the human experience. But I imagine it might feel different for those who are lonely, isolated, or on the margins. On an early episode of Hard Fork, a trans teenager sent in a voice memo to tell us about using ChatGPT to get daily affirmations about identity issues. The power of giving what were then text messages a warm and kindly voice, I think, should not be underestimated.
Clearly, there are going to be great businesses to build in the domains of digital humans and the licensing of celebrity IP rights into this new virtual space.
But I don’t think this new market is the interesting thing, as valuable as it will be. I think what this is really starting to tell us about are the societal risks of AI.
We’ve seen with social media that its created radicalised social groups from ideas grown in internet communities. Take your pick from the incels, the #QAnons, the teenage jihadis and many other of the horrors of the last fifteen years.
We need to think early what new kinds of social belief will emerge from the echo chamber of AI-mediated social media. What happens when communities and AI’s - with all their proneness to hallucination and misreads - start disappearing down the same rabbit holes?
Places like the Trust in Autonomous Systems Hub, a UKRI-funded initiative based at King’s College London, are exploring this, but there is much to do and fast. Back in 2006 if you’d predicted you’d have mainstream politicians openly advocating conspiracy theories begun on YouTube and Facebook, you’d have been laughed out of the house. Let’s please not let this happen with a technology in AI that might be many, many times more powerful than social media.
Things to do this Week // LFF, ZKM, MMLF, NXT, &&&
This week’s things to do is an explosion of acronym-driven goodness.
Bonus points for those who already knows what they mean before they read the listings…
LFF Expanded is the immersive and XR arm of the London Film Festival. LOADS of digital creative goodness on show for the next couple of weeks. Book your tickets here.
The ZKM Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe is one of the key collections of digital art in the world - on the 25th October hear from their curators in an online talk with the venerable Computer Arts Society
Marshmallow Laser Feast - a name so good it shouldn’t be shortened to MMLF, but hey - are doing some user testing on a new VR experience, which will inevitably be awesome. Find out more and sign-up to help, here
NXT Museum in Amsterdam has quickly become a world-leader in digital creativity and the brilliant Random International are nxt (see what I did there?) up for an exhibition. More here.
Parametric Architecture do seriously cool stuff at the axis of architecture and technology. They are launching a Global AI Creative Challenge for architects and designers. Check it out.
And mentioned last week, Arebyte Gallery in City Island (blissfully acronym free) in the Docklands launch their new AI-themed show by Zach Blas this week, Cultus.
40 years of infinite game-verses // From Starfield to Elite
Last week we looked at how some of the biggest innovations in culture and creativity are happening around us in “slow-time.” Alongside an awareness of slow-speed change, it’s also important we understand how other apparently radical jump-off points actually mark the continuation or closure of a longer-term wave of innovation.
The big news in gaming of the last three months has been the launch of Starfield, a game taking place across an infinite - and incredibly realised - universe.
This comes as Roblox releases an AI-powered games maker to help create generative gaming worlds, and as a wave of start-ups like Iconic Games. led by the brilliant John Lusty who I worked with years back to make a 3D tour of the British Museum for Facebook.
The journey to this remarkable point has been a long one - it was 1984 when games first launched out towards the infinite.
Elite, originally released for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron in what was the world’s first 3D computer game, took place against a procedurally generated starfield that crossed eight galaxies. Its radicalism cannot be underestimated, unlocking an exploration of spaces and places beyond intentional design.
Watching the gameplay video from the PC version below, I think it still carries a sense of awe. To me, it still feels strange and new.
But what happens when the infinite breaks?
One of my favourite moments in gaming comes in this video where Twitch streamer Mystical Midget breaks the algorithmically created universe of Minecraft.
After walking through procedurally generated landscape for some 2500 hours, he reaches the Far Lands, an end point where the games physics fall apart, the infinite collapses, and the rules break.
Like Jim Carrey in that ending to The Truman Show, quite suddenly we reach the end of the universe and go out through the exit to somewhere stranger still.
GAME OVER.
See you next week.
A word about our sponsors // Preview Tools
I’m delighted to have Preview Tools as the first sponsor of “Creative R&D”. If you’re a gallery, museum or immersive experience, Preview Tools lets you make videos inside a digital twin of your spaces. CHECK IT OUT.
