#11: Making Darkness Visible
This week: Your guided tour of the internet's infrastructure | Mapping the arts ecosystem | Humane.AI and life beyond the screen | Plus: your invite to a webinar on the future of customer engagement
This week’s theme is the unseen and the hidden.
With art and creativity, perhaps more than anything, we focus on what we can see, touch, hear and experience.
But beneath that are structures and systems that both create and constrain possibility.
This week we look at two brilliant way those systems and structures are being revealed, and imagine how a new technology might transform our primary interface with the everyday.
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Cables, Towers and Centers // The Internet is REAL!
We have developed - and been sold - a language for the digital which is abstract and celestial. Whether we’re talking about “cyberspace” or the “cloud”, we talk about the internet in a language that is disembodied and de-materialised.
But the internet is physical, and its physicality is something whose implications and impacts on our lives we should understand better.
I’d been thinking about this as we - finally 🙏🙏 - got full fibre broadband fitted on our North London street.
Seeing it happen was not a profound encounter with tomorrow’s technology. It was rather a quaintly old-fashioned physical process of cables being pulled and threaded from man-hole cover to man-hole cover and driveways and garden paths being assembled and disassembled so those cables could be drilled through walls and connected to routers.
But it’s not just yellow fibre optic cables and the junction boxes they spin out from. It’s a whole semi-visible infrastructure of data centres, telecoms towers and ecommerce distribution centres which are the internet’s physical manifestation, but which we barely see or think about.
This semi-visibility is unhelpful - it leaves us ignorant of where we live and the conditions under which we live there.
Thinking about all this, I was ecstatic when I stumbled on Internet Tour.
Founded in Spain back in 2018, Internet Tour is:
an open and replicable tour operator focused on the phenomenon of tele-technologies. A journey through the physical Internet infrastructure, a tourist route of non-touristic places.
Reader, I ❤️❤️❤️ it.
Go on an Internet Tour of Madrid, Barcelona, San Francisco or Berlin and you get to see these surfacings of the internet.
Photos of the tour show half-built data centres, cables breaking out of the ground, coffees in front of 5G towers.
They offer a stark, brilliant encounter with the reality of the internet.
I would LOVE to go.
Hell, I’d love to make my own - starting with those yellow fibre optic cables coming in through my own front door, and taking in any of the 89 data centres in London currently listed on Data Center Map. Or the 286 in the UK. Or the huge series of largely nameless distribution logistics centres that line the A1 and M1 motorways for the first fifty miles north of London, ferrying our online purchases into the city every day.
The conspiracy theorists have made sure we know a lot about 5G towers, and their sheer energy indulgence meant we heard a lot about the Crypto Mines in Rekjavik, but it’s the rest of this vast restructuring of our physical environment to support the digital realm I find more important.
It all reminds me of seeing a talk by the great architect Rem Koolhaas in Paris.
He was in a dialogue with a senior Google AI leader at an event run by Google Arts and Culture. Rem showed a series of pictures of some of Google’s major data centres out in the Nevada desert - buildings he saw that were designed not for humans, but to be run autonomously, absent of humans.
That sense of a changing rural world would go onto influence Rem and his practice OMA’s brilliant Guggenheim exhibition, “Countryside: The Future” and book, “Countryside: A Report”.
But it’s not just the countryside. It’s everywhere. There is no part of our physical world which is now not being redesigned to meet the needs of the internet.
We need to pay more attention to that. To see and feel what it means. And to question it.
Internet Tour are brilliant guides. Follow them.
Next week // Join me for an Exclusive Webinar!
On December 12th, I can’t wait to co-host an exclusive webinar on the future of customer engagement for museums with the brilliant Anh Nguyen, CEO of NIMI.
NIMI is a platform for digital collectibles that’s already helped the Belvedere launch their hugely successful NFT project. Both Anh and I believe one key future trend is how digital collectibles will evolve and enhance the membership and donor experience for museums and other cultural institutions and visitor attractions.
We’re going to explore this and case studies of blockchain adoption in a 45 minute live session from Chicago Booth’s London Campus on Tuesday 12th December.
A New Map // Describing the Arts ecosystem
On Monday night I headed over to McKinsey’s London offices for the launch of a new report, “The Arts in the UK: Seeing the big picture”.
There is a very necessary lining up of policy thinking ahead of a UK election next year - and the McKinsey report is a good and useful piece of work.
What it does - I think for the first time - is make a coherent argument about the UK arts as an ecosystem, built on a series of five core connections between:
different art forms
not-for-profit and for-profit arts organisations
artists and arts organisations in different locations
arts organisations, local public bodies, and local businesses
the arts sector and the broader creative industries
I think this is a crucial perspective and one which provides more subtlety than the urgent but often empty calls for more public funding for arts organisations.
Presenting a view of a whole socioeconomic system - public, private, small, large, and the services and freelancers which interact with it - which accounts for around 2% of the total UK economy gives a genuine sense of scale and importance. And what is at stake if different parts are allowed to fail.
And it will better help make the case for public funding as the interdependencies between the public and private are better understood - if we can properly articulate how the market is driven from public sector arts, then the case for new money is much easier made.
Worth noting also that the intersection between technology and the arts is included in the report:
The broader creative industries are also critical partners for the arts sector in the use of new technologies. These offer new opportunities for the creative process. Technology can transform audience reach through digital platforms, increase the share of collections available for public consumption, and create opportunities for personalised experiences through the use of augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mixed reality, and artificial intelligence (AI)
You’ll guess, I agree with this - and ❤️❤️❤️ to see one of our National Gallery digital projects, Keeper of Paintings made by Creative R&D readers Arcade and supported by Storyfutures, and Current Rising the amazing hyppereality opera we featured in issue 7 as examples of how these things come together.
Get reading.
A New Voice // Life Beyond the Screen
A few weeks back, there was A LOT of noise about the arrival of Humane.AI’s Pin.
A start-up backed by $100m of VC investment and led by two former senior Apple folks, the Pin is the first in a new category of device we are likely to see more of: screens and cameras gone to be replaced by voice-accessed AI assistants and real-time scanning of the physical environment.
The launch video is creepy in a way only Silicon Valley could possibly be, but it’s worth watching.
There’s a lot to work through about the ethics of this new device category - if a category it expands to be.
But there’s a part of me that wants the Pin - or something like it - to succeed, as a corrective to the awful corrosion of the real world that mobile devices have caused.
We live this everyday - this weird world where everybody, everywhere all the time, is living half through their phones. It’s a behaviour not two decades old, and the faster it ends, the better.
But I’m getting diverted.
If we are about to see a new category of devices emerge, it’s worth thinking through what new kinds of creativity a device like the Pin might help emerge.
My take: this opens up new domains for non-visual content created in real-time based on motion and voice.
Let’s sketch some possibilities:
The soundtrack to your life.
Computer games composers have been building capabilities in non-linear and dynamic music creation for years - interactive soundtracks that alter as your characters move around game-worlds and have different encounters. With real-time and AI’s growth, companies like Reactional Music (advised by Creative R&D reader Luke Ritchie) are now opening that out, offering generative extensions of licensed music tracks that modulate and flow with game-states.
The Pin could open that out to create dynamic generative soundtracks to your life as you move around the real world, the AI providing “variations on a theme” that would shift and mutate in real-time, responding to your real world actions.
We all know that feeling of a perfect musical moment coming up on headphones - serendipity putting the perfect beat, the perfect melody out at just the right time and elevating the everyday.
I had it last week at Leicester Square underground station as a bit of Morricone’s soundtrack to Once Upon a Time in the West hit at just the most beautiful of moments and I was transported, Charles Bronson in a black hoodie, rising up to meet a half-imagined Henry Fonda on Charing Cross Road.
But what if that could happen ALL THE TIME? Real-time generative music, paced to the movement of your footsetps, responding to the built environment around you and emerging out of the melodies of Morricone, Wagner, Aphex Twin or Fela Kuti could be totally AMAZING 🔥🔥🔥.
That voice inside your head
This second one is a bit more abstract, so bear with me.
One of the more profound possibilities of being attached to an AI is the way it might shift our dialogue with ourselves.
We spend our lives with an interior voice talking alongside the things we say out loud. Sometimes there, sometimes silent, whatever it is, it’s saying something DIFFERENT to the words that come out of our mouths. And as any insomniac will tell you, we really have very little control of what it says at all.
What will happen to that little voice if we have an AI Collaborator always available, always listening, to the things we say? We’ve become so comfortable with seeing people talking into thin air as bluetooth headsets and Air Pods have become so popular. But what about when that dialogue is between a person and their AI?
Will we talk more? Asking questions, engaged in some unending open conversation? Or will the voice inside our head stop that dialogue, keeping us and the AI apart, purely functional interlocutors? Are there creative ways where our inner voice could be teased out better, bringing wellness where it’s helpful, and helping us to better understand ourselves?
I’ve only really got questions, but I think that’s exciting.
The Smart Watch - the last major consumer digital device - has led to no new creativity at all. The next generation device, the screenless Pin, seems like it can lead to much much more.
Now I am 1, Now I am 10 // Happy Birthdays!
Last but not least - three significant birthdays this week:
To ChatGpt, which turned 1 this week! Fair to say, it’s had some impact…
To Digital Catapult, 10 this week and celebrating in style
And last but not least, to Creative R&D reader and art-tech doyenne Suhair Kahn whose party at the ICA I was very sorry to miss 😱😱
See you next week. ❤️❤️
NB: Poetry fans, yes, that title was Milton again.