#10: Avatars Wear Make-Up Too!
This week: Inhuman perspectives in Berlin | Critical reading on digital fashion and identity | On property rights in augmented space ... plus last chance tickets for Beyond 2023.
This week, we reached #10. 10 issues of “Creative R&D”! Where has the time gone?
I’d been thinking about doing this for aaaaggges. Then I just sat down one day in September and did it.
And now we’re at issue #10.
We’ve got an ever-growing community of readers, reaching A LOT of the best arts, creative, academic and government brains in the world (yes reader, that means YOU!). Some of you even pay I love you most of all 😂!
In just a couple of months “Creative R&D” has had sponsors and partners, been on the radio, led to some great speaking invites and invites to launches. Most of all, I’ve been overwhelmed by the positive feedback, and sense this is doing something useful.
And there’s much much more to come. So, stay tuned over the coming weeks.
And thank you for coming with me on this journey.
Now, onto this week’s Creative R&D 🔥🔥🔥🔥
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More than human // Light. Art. Space.
Writing this on Saturday afternoon amidst the breaking story of the sacking of Open AI founder, Sam Altman, it seems a good moment to reflect on the likely impacts of artificial intelligence on society, and how art is helping us understand the world that AI will make.
In his email response to this dramatic plot twist on Saturday afternoon,
writes:If we believe AI is a powerful general-purpose technology, then it is going to have massive impacts… Not just to our productivity but to our cultures, communities and quotidian. …
OpenAI’s crisis is like a terrarium for the wider debate about technology-in-society in general and AI in particular.
What gives me comfort amidst this confusion, is how helpful I think art, artists and art institutions are being in helping us to understand the world that AI is going to shape.
And this week in Berlin, with Lawrence Lek’s NOX, we can see another superb example.
Nox is a large scale installation commissioned by the brilliant LAS Art Foundation - and Lek and LAS make a great combination.
Lawrence Lek has developed a deeply narrative-driven practise over the last decade. He makes galleries into living computer games, open-world environments like those you encounter in Grand Theft Auto or Zelda, but grounded in stories games will never to tell.
NOX is set in the headquarters of an AI company, Farsight Corporation, where it,
trains and treats their sentient self-driving cars. Each class of vehicle serves a different role, such as delivery, patrol or pleasure, and has a corresponding personality type. When their cars begin to demonstrate undesirable behaviour, Farsight summons them to the centre — titled NOX, short for ‘Nonhuman Excellence’ — to undergo a five-day rehabilitation programme.
With a rogue self-aware car becoming the main subject and storyteller of the show, Lek creates a high-sheen exploration of the digital age’s uncanny.
But look beyond the art to the commissioning institution. It’s LAS-Art Foundation and their approach which really matters here.
LAS are a radical force. Lawrence Lek is one example amongst many of how their shows make non-human perspectives a key part of both the act of creation and consumption.
In Nox, it’s an autonomous car that’s the subject of the show - and the car’s story we hear and experience. Ian Cheng’s Life After Bob is a story of an AI, made with AI. Back in 2019 a performance by deliriously unlistenable electronica Amnesia Scanner’s gave an AI-musician a rubbery flesh, like something from a David Cronenberg movie, that they called the Oracle.
It’s not only AI.
Go to Berlin now and you can see Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s algorithmically designed plant-sculpture project, Pollinator Pathmaker which creates gardens designed not just to be viewed by us, but to be used by bees and other insects critical to our global biological ecosystems.
Describing this brilliant project, Ginsberg seems to speak on behalf of the whole body of LAS-Art Foundation’s work when she asks:
Can the audience for an artwork be more-than-human?
LAS-Art Foundation are key explorers of the kinds of question
asks about the impact of AI we opened with, . They have helped brilliantly expand our creative sense of both the subject and object of what we mean by art. AIs become viewers and participants. Artworks are made for bees.Now we need to shape the development of technology and society to meet the utopian promise, or dystopian threat, of their art..
In the face of technology and environmental change, allowing the non-human and the more than human to speak and to participate in art and culture is not just an extraordinary opportunity, it’s an obligation.
LAS-Art Foundation are the sharpest voice answering that call.
Special Reader Offer // Beyond Conference
We are just two days away until Beyond Conference, our partner for “Creative R&D” this November.
I can’t wait to chair a session on Tuesday looking at collaboration in museum storytelling, but there’s so much more to see.
For Creative R&D newsletter readers, tickets are available at the special rate of £299 - that's a discount of £100! Find out more and book here.
Critical reading // On digital fashion and digital identity
Whilst IRL I’m firmly a hoodies/combats/Nikes kinda guy, I ❤️❤️❤️ the potential of digital fashion.
This week I want to flag three brilliant pieces of insight onto what’s a complex area to understand - a creative space and commercial market that’s growing fast, but which is all but invisible outside its niche.
First up is Roblox’s Digital Expressions Report. Roblox have scale, and so when they dig into their users’ sense of what digital fashion means, we need to listen - it has authority.
Go read the report yourself - it’s super clear - but two main takeaways for me were the creation of a fashion culture with strength and depth INSIDE Roblox, and the permeation of that digital fashion culture OUTSIDE Roblox and into the real world. 84% of Roblox users surveyed said that their real world fashion choices were influenced by how they dressed their avatars. 84%!
Nike are well ahead on this, with their digital-first trainers - you buy them as a digital collectible to unlock the real life purchase - coming on sale soon.
That’s a great bridge into this week’s second critical read - this excellent report from the British Fashion Council and True Search on the digital fashion market. One of its best insights is just how much money Nike might have made here - over £1bn in revenues so far from its digital collectible trainers and outfits.
That’s real money.
And last up, is this awesome analysis from
looking at feature sets for digital fashion projects from the biggest players in the field.
Dive in.
New domains // Darabase and augmented space
New forms of art and creativity emerge when the virtual and the real collide.
We looked back in issue three and then in issue five at digital twins - where the real-world is transformed through motion and volume capture into ever more real-time digital simulations. Sports, performance and museum experiences are all seeing transformations from the live into the “virtually live”.
But of all the different creative virtual domains still to be fully realised, it’s the power and potential of augmented reality - where digital intermingles directly with the real world - which remains the most exciting.
Augmented reality is hard. Whilst it’s easy to imagine (and for VFX houses to visualise) the digital organically threaded into the real world, DOING it remains extremely difficult.
The original Magic Leap concept video that got the world so excited back in 2015 remains a brilliant fantasy. But now it mostly represents just the deep abyss of a multi-billion dollar venture capital investment - and a dream that is only edging slowly towards realisation.
Early in November, a fascinating new building block in the development of AR was unveiled. It is not like the sexy-as-hell Magic Leap video - but it could be more important.
Darabase, led by Dominic Collins who previously ran XR firm Jaunt and EE Digital, is a digital property rights platform. For AR to really work, further advances in optics, device design and battery life are needed. But perhaps even more, to unlock the potential of the augmented world, we need legally recognised rights of ownership for the new digital spaces that AR overlays upon the real world.
Darabase marks a major step forward in that direction.
Explaining what it does is simple.
With AR, you can overlay digital imagery and sound on the real world as it gets seen through the screens of a phone, a tablet or perhaps the smart glasses and contact lenses of the augmented world to come.
But who owns the space in which that digital imagery gets seen?
That question is essential to the future of the advertising industry. If every time someone held up a phone in front of a Coca-Cola ad it was digitally obscured by a Pepsi one, then a whole industrial model is suddenly under threat. And if Google could start super-serving digital ads to overlay every Out of Home billboard owned by Clear Channel or Ocean Outdoor, then that industrial model is not just under threat - it’s extinct.
So we need rules - and legally binding ones - for real-world property owners to secure proper ownership over what digital content gets served into and onto their physical environments. This is where Darabase is focussed, with a proper investment into the legal frameworks that underpin it - their legal white paper is really worth reading.
For me the question then becomes: what new kinds of culture can emerge from rules-based digitally augmented space?
I think there is rich potential here for the formation of entirely new kinds of creative markets.
In its early phases, there has been no real way for scalable business models to form around augmented reality content.
But augmented festivals, digital performance and virtual sports events overlaid onto public fora, or inside empty buildings will be able to transition from R&D experiment to commercially possible as we geo-and temporally fence digital content access. Properly implemented, these new live virtual event-based markets are full of vast potential .
Enabling that is not Darabase’s business, but as we saw with
back in issue 4, finding ways to optimise advertising spaces for art is a critical opportunity in a digitising world. Darabase’s creation of the rules and technologies that will help advertising prosper in augmented reality is an important step towards enabling tomorrow’s digital creative culture.I wish them luck.
Incoming! // The Blooloop Festival of Innovation
With Beyond Conference happening this week, you’ll soon be getting itchy again for some innovation event excellence.
In December I’m speaking at Blooloop’s Festival of Innovation alongside the CTO of Area 15 - Las Vegas’ immersive experience zone, and the amazing Squint/Opera. Loads to check out, and not just online - there’s an IRL party to celebrate 10 years of the Blooloop 50 on the 5th December.
See you there, and see you next week.
❤️🔥❤️🔥