#14: Ride the Silver Rocket
This week: Pussy Riot and real-time art // On 3D Dreams // Artist Wolfe Von Lenkiewicz on AI // Plus: Your exclusive offer for Remix Summit London 2024 and this week's hottest jobs
Welcome to 2024 at “Creative R&D”.
Our newsletter community got a lot bigger over the Christmas break.
Industry bible The Art Newspaper did a Christmas feature on six things to look out for in art and technology in 2024. The Apple Vision Pro came first. This newsletter came second.
BOOOOM. 🔥🔥🔥
So a massive welcome to all new readers.
What i’m trying to do is hopefully quite simple. Technology change is having a huge impact on art and creativity, and those impacts are speeding up.
This newsletter exists to try and capture those impacts as they’re happening.
A massive welcome also to January’s partners, Remix Summits, old friends and collaborators, with an AWESOME offer below.
Let’s get straight down to business. 💥💥💥💥
Loving your weekly dose of “Creative R&D”? Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription - the more time I have to write this the better it will be!
There’s No Future // Pussy Riot’s Art of the Present
I went to Copenhagen between Christmas and New Year, and spent a day at the brilliant Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
I'd expected to write about their current shows on AI, or about Nigerian architecture practise Cave_Bureau’s explorations of the forgotten histories and spaces of the slave trade. Or of Firelei Baez’s brilliant post-colonial painting, an explosion of imaginative myth-making about gender and race.
But it was the first major Gallery show by Russian punk art rebels Pussy Riot that said something to me about art in a digitising world.
You know who Pussy Riot are.
Their public fight against Putin’s regime has lasted a decade and will go on as long as Russia remains under his control.
I saw the show with my 9 year old daughter, and I said to her at the end: grow up brave like them. Their absolute conviction in the face of brutality is astonishing.
But where is the “art” in what Pussy Riot do?
Pussy Riot’s work is built entirely out of cliches.
CONCEPT: A Punk Rock girl-group on an epic quest against EVIL is a story from an 80s comic-book by Alan Moore or Grant Morrison. It’s the Invisibles made real.
VISUAL DESIGN: An explosion of acid yellows and pinks - stripping down and simplifying the visual language of Jamie Reid’s work for the Sex Pistols decades ago.
MUSIC: They're not a punk rock band you should actually listen to. There’s no “God Save the Queen” or “Rebel Girl” here.
IDEAS: There’s no real critique of Putin’s Russia, no path to explaining why. And they're not journalists or writers. The walls of the Louisiana are covered in notes about Kremlin goons. But the words are no Chernobyl Prayer.
Everything Pussy Riot do is a distilled, simplified reference to worn-out and over-familiar ideas from Western culture.
Except in how they surface those ideas, when they suddenly come vividly brutally alive.
Pussy Riot’s art happens in the act of capturing what they do on digital video. When they take all these cliches and bring them to life out on the streets of Moscow capturing it on mobile phones or Go Pros, I think they become amongst the most powerful artists alive. When that happens, they are paragons of the utopian power of social media video to bear witness to the present.
Their art is the power of phones to capture and preserve history as it happens.
Their art is the grubby, shaky image of the world-changing in real-time as people demand freedom.
This version of art, they do brilliantly.
…And when they do that, they also tell us something new about an old tension between Russia and the West.
Russian art, to take a famous idea from Orlando Figes’ Natasha’s Dance, arises from the clash of European progress and Russia’s own conservative and deeply complex culture.
Putin, like many Russian leaders before him, rejected Europe and the West’s values in pursuit of a Greater Russia that never quite existed.
Pussy Riot, quite literally in the first work in the show, piss the West back in his face. And the videos of them dancing in Red Square or in a Moscow Cathedral are their testimony to our own decadent freedoms.
Freedoms that they shout loudly will not be driven out of Russia, no matter what.
That makes Pussy Riot a testament to Western modernity, but let’s also acknowledge that they represent values which are now more than slightly out of date.
Watching their videos at the Louisiana was the first time since about 2016 I’d felt GOOD about social media. I felt again the same liberating potential I did around the Arab Spring - a feeling now driven away for good by the Trump election, Cambridge Analytica and Brexit, and by the Instagram misinformation warfare of Syria, Ukraine and now the Gaza Strip.
So Pussy Riot are also a memory of the potential of digital media we’ve lost - a thorn in Putin’s side, and a sharp reminder of the liberating ideal of “connection” that got torn away from us not yet a decade ago.
London Calling // Remix Summits Exclusive Offer
Remix Summit is a conference that is VERY close to my heart and so I’m delighted they’re our partner for January.
Remix was the first conference I ever spoke at when I first came into the cultural sector, and this year’s conference will be my fifth appearance in a decade.
It is THE BEST place to get the state of the art in culture, tech and entrepreneurship, and this year’s theme is ‘Ideas for the Revolution’ on the 30-31 January 2024 at the Royal Academy of Arts & Here East.
“Creative R&D” Readers are being given a very special 25% discount on tickets. Just enter CREATRD when you check out at www.remixsummits.com/ldn-2024/.
The line-up looks 🔥🔥🔥 as always, and I’m excited to be in conversation with gaming legend Miles Jacobson OBE, Studio Director of Sports Interactive (creators of the global sensation Football Manager) on the future of gaming.
If you can get there, do - there’s no better way to start off 2024.
Enter Sandman // Three Dimensional Dreams
A couple of weeks before Christmas I co-curated an event for UKRI/AHRC and the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology with good buddy and newsletter reader Professor Jonny Freeman from Goldsmiths.
One of the demos we brought in was from the excellent Charisma AI - a real success story of the UK’s creative technology scene.
They’ve just launched this very cool “dream simulator”, Project Electric Sheep, which uses Generative AI to construct dream worlds on the fly. You write down your dream and it makes a 3D environment in its image you can explore, meeting. It’s a clever attempt to simulate the uncanny.
And it got me thinking.
Dreams are always our go-to metaphor for new kinds of creativity whatever the medium, but they have a special - and undocumented - place in games culture.
Just last month, Xbox held an event at the Outernet to showcase research they’d carried out on the impact of gaming on dream states.
The most ambitious game launch of the last five years was Dreams, a huge - and ultimately failed - attempt to let games players become games makers. Or to let people make their own dreams.
And mega-franchise Assassin’s Creed - a totem in many ways of historical accuracy as it has recreated sites from revolutionary France or ancient Egypt - depends on dream narrative, its main character having out-of-body virtual experiences on behalf of a secret agency.
There’s cultural history here to be written.
But of all the ways games have represented dreams, visions and hallucination, there’s nothing so all out weird as this.
“LSD Emulator” is a deeply, deeply odd game from the late 90s. You wander around inside someone else’s dream - it was its game designer’s dream journals made digital flesh.
Honestly, it is as avant garde as David Lynch or Matthew Barney at full tilt.
What I think LSD Dream Emulator understood, is the deeply physical nature of dreams, the way they arise out of physical sensation.
It mixes 3d worlds with sudden 2d interventions, creating a sensual instability which is very close to my own experience of dreams - the way they keep shifting and changing, totally beyond control.
I ❤️❤️❤️ it.
If you’re interested in dreams, and how games and digital media may interact with them, this great paper from MIT researchers is worth a read.
Critical Viewing // Wolfe Von Lenkiewicz on AI
❤️LOVED❤️ this interview by Rupert Harris, CEO of Preview Tools with Lenkiewicz, whose work has picked apart and put back together art history in a way not that dissimilar to the hallucinations of AI.
Intrigued?
Check out this old exhibition by Wolfe at the Saatchi Gallery and you’ll see what I mean about the similarities with AI’s dreams - he makes paintings that reconfigure Rembrandt, Holbein and Van Dyck as strange and futuristic fantasies.
Cool stuff.
New year, new gig? // This week’s hottest jobs.
This week’s jobs in the ecosystem are ALL with Oxford University’s Cultural Programme. In a couple of years they’ll help open the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, a radical coming together of academia, arts and technology with major new performance and creative spaces - and world-class ambitions.
They’re building a team and there’s a whole batch of cool jobs going.
Music Programme Producer (£45,585 - £59,421 PA)
Performing Arts Producer (£36,024 - £44,263 PA)
Audience and Campaigns Officer (£36,024 - £44,263 PA)
Social Media and Content Officer (£32,332 - £38,205 PA)
Senior Development Executive (£45,585 - £59,421 PA) (closing date for this one is TOMORROW!)
I can attest - as always - they are awesome people. ❤️
Full details here - https://oxfordculturalprogramme.org.uk/jobs/
This week’s references // Punk Rock special
For new readers: I throw a lot of culture-references in as we go.
This week, in honour of Pussy Riot, it’s a punk rock themed special.
So, a quick glossary.
This week’s title is the chorus from Sonic Youth’s “Silver Rocket”, one of the best tracks on 1987’s “Daydream Nation”. My favourite album EVER.
“Come on, Get Up / The Waiting Room” is from late 80s DC hardcore punks Fugazi. This live video is sooo cool - controlled frenzy at its finest.
“There’s no future.” Sex Pistols. You knew that.
There’s a Bikini Kill reference in there too. This video montage of different live versions of Rebel Girl is 🔥🔥🔥
“Enter Sandman”, Metallica. Not quite punk, but a hell of a song my son is learning to play at the moment. DOO DEE DOO DOO.
But ignore the punk rock, if you’ve got this far, PLEASE go and find yourselves a copy of Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich. The testimony of hundreds of Chernobyl survivors distilled into choric prose poetry, it is quite possibly the greatest book I’ve ever read, beautiful, horrifying, funny and incredibly humane.
Thanks for reading.
See you next week. ❤️❤️