#18: Disintegration

This week: Immersive Institutions expanded // On the Musical Age of Sh*tpost Modernism // The creative potential of thermal imaging

This week’s been a bit mad.

My cover piece for The Art Newspaper dropped on Monday - more on which below - and then Tuesday I was hosting an interview at the brilliant Remix Summits. Let alone the consulting day job and the parenting doubly day job. It’s been hectic.

So i’m a little behind this month - I’ve been trying to keep a reader offer on tickets for conferences or other exclusive content, but haven’t got there. Bear with me 🙏🙏. Or if you’ve got an offer you’d like to share with our amazing readers, drop me a line.

UPDATE: I told you before how awesome Diane Drubay was. Her WAC Weekly - THE best place to find out what’s going on in Web 3 and Art and Culture - has come on board as February partners.

So, let’s dig right into another batch of R&D goodness…

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Art! // Immersive Institutions Expanded

If you’ve not read my piece in The Art Newspaper yet on the rise of the Immersive Institution, well, go do it now.

Es Devlin’s Nevada Ark, the cover image of this month’s The Art Newspaper

Too busy/tired/hungover to read?

Well, here’s me on The Week in Art podcast expanding on the ideas. Talking to journalist and art historian Ben Luke was a good chance to dig into the experiential side of immersive art and to pull back and look at its wider historic context.

I wanted to tell this story in a place like The Art Newspaper to make sure the museum and gallery world starts paying attention to this digital-age phenomenon.

But they’re not the only ones who need to think through what’s happening here. There’s a lot more to unpack - and a lot more questions to ask.

Here’s my starter list for ten if it stirred your imaginations.

For Creative Industries researchers:

• How do we capture the impacts and meaning of this new wave of institution?

• What do audiences really think about them?

• What’s their socio-economic value?

For research funders into the Creative Economy:

• Why did the great Creative R&D investment wave of the last decade - nearly £500m in the UK alone - totally ignore this space, where there’s now a real market, as opposed to the relentless push on XR, where there’s still largely only pre- or early market conditions?

• What’s wrong with our foresight approach that missed the growth of this area? What equivalent very early market growth areas are we missing now?

For the Art Market:

• How do we align the public demand for immersive artists with sellable formats at auction to build a strong global digital art market? Can we?

• How can we help museums and galleries start collecting in this space?

For Art and Design Schools:

• Are you teaching for these new canvases?

• Are you creating pathways to help your students work in this new market?

But perhaps most critically, what other kinds of digital-age institution might follow?

I don’t think this will be the only manifestation of new digital age art and culture institutions.

I talked back in Issue 5 about distributed institutions and the rise of Arkive.

I think DAOs (distributed autonomous organisations) offer a model for collectively organised institutional entities to form alternative kinds of cultural institution. Arkive are doing this to acquire art. Hackney’s ArtSect are doing it as a way to acquire property. Both are doing it to rebuild the decision making process at the heart of curation.

Hackney Wick’s ArtSect - a radical decentralised model for Gallery ownership

And maybe there’s one other lesson to learn from the rise of the Immersive Institution, which is not to look at what we think is cool or avant-garde for tomorrow’s major forms of culture, but at what in its rawest form stimulates demand.

The Van Gogh immersive shows this major new global creative market grew out from were never cool. Never avant garde. But they were always popular.

Out of that popularity came the chance to build something bigger.

For anyone thinking about where to invest or where to look to tomorrow’s trends, looking at the uncool thing that millions of people love is always a good place to start.

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Ideas! // The Musical Age of Shitpost Modernism

Many of you will have seen the sad news about Pitchfork, for much of this century one of the major websites for credible music journalism, being merged by their owners Conde Nast into GQ magazine, with a heap of job cuts to follow.

I’ve spent a lot of time on their site over the years, learning about new bands and testing my own opinion of albums I love. Just this week I was going through reviews of Cure reissues to see how their take measures up to mine.*

There’s some irony in them announcing the semi-death of Pitchfork now, because I thought over the last few weeks they’d published a piece which really seemed to get an angle on the future.

Kieran Press-Reynolds is turning into a wildly interesting music writer, at a point where the whole idea of being a “music journo” seems more than threatened - it’s on the top of the endangered list.

He should have form - both his mum and dad are music writing legends. His dad, Simon Reynolds, I mentioned before when talking about memes and rave culture back in Issue 9. His mum Joy Press writes has been a staff writer at the Village Voice and now at Vanity Fair. Together they wrote The Sex Revolts which first unpacked the misogyny and the mysticism beneath rock and roll - a book once read you can’t unread. It changes the way you hear The Rolling Stones, Nick Cave or My Bloody Valentine.

Press-Reynolds is more in his dad’s line - he’s an investigator of new emerging forms that don’t quite have a name. Where his dad found early Jungle and Drum and Bass, or Post-Rock (both genres he was the first to write about in the mainstream press) in clubs or record shops, Press-Reynolds finds them deep in the YouTube Algorithm.

His piece on Pitchfork The Musical Age of Shitpost Modernism takes in a lot of territory - tics in the sound of new rappers, jazz and electronic music that’s half deranged comedy, half-avant garde. As he puts it:

Rather than straight-up comedy music, the shitpost modernists aren’t often explicitly branded as “funny.” The humor and innovation is more oblique: It’s in the degraded structure of the track, the mutant vocals, the shock of a surreal high-low juxtaposition. What also separates this era of artfully inane music is the sheer volume of it and its wide-scale popularity. In a streaming world that prioritizes ephemeral dopamine hits and algorithm-piercing smashes, ideas like radio-readiness or conceptual heft can feel quaint. So instead of trying to appeal to the everyman or the critic, a mass of young musicians are fucking around. The result is a feast of freakiness that’s perfect for zoomer brains that have hatched to (im)maturity in a vat of digital absurdism.

There’s a lot of new music here you won’t have heard. It doesn’t make it to BBC 6 music, let alone the mainstream. But it’s music intersecting with the same cultural forces driving TikTok memes, anime culture and gaming that my teenage boys live inside of. A pile up of styles that’s very different to what is culturally acceptable or aligned with music history.

Like those Van Gogh immersive experiences, this stuff’s not cool, but it’s hella popular - so may tell us more about the future than anything else going on right now.

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Technology! // New R&D in Thermal Imaging

I’ve talked a few times about the way new kinds of imaging are creating new kinds of storytelling.

LIDAR scanning in particular is helping create new categories of creative visualisation - visualising the invisible as in the brilliant Buried in the Rock we covered in issue 9.

So reading this story about new innovations in thermal imaging got me wondering what creativity it might unlock.

The Spinning Metacam - a major leap forward in thermal imaging

Thermal imaging is what has helped us see in the dark.

Using infrared radiation to capture imagery at a much higher wavelength than in the visible range, thermal imaging cameras emerged out of military use into consumer applications through the 1980s and 1990s.

As they did, they became part of a new way of seeing in visual culture.

Two great films of that period depend on them.

First in John McTiernan’s Predator, up-there alongside Terminator and Robocop as the best of 80s action movies, the alien hunter sees in the thermal range.

Shot with a bulky thermal camera in the steamy jungle, this pushed a technology into a place it didn’t want to be, but helped shape a movie franchise that’s still going 35 years later, and still using the thermal “sight'“ metaphor in the excellent 2022 Predator prequel, Prey.

A couple of years after Predator, Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs would use night-vision headsets as part of its othering of the transvestite serial killer Buffalo Bill. Down in his murderous basement, he hunts Jodie Foster in green thermal light.

Both those ways of seeing seem so familiar now - they both entered popular culture so quickly, with so many imitations and off-shoots.

But they were a radical outcome of technology change - a type of imaging that from its invention in 1929 to the 1980s was firmly in the military domain.

As the devices became available to filmmakers, they gave them metaphoric meaning - thermography feels unhuman, weird, and so it suits aliens or murderers.

What then will this next wave of thermal imaging help us see? What stories will it help us tell. How will it light up the invisible out there in the dark?

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* FWIW, I’d go with Pornography as the best Cure album every time. Up there with Public Image Limited’s Metal Box as the best album of the late 70s early 80s. Pitchfork prefers the record before Faith.

Love that hair.

See you next week. ❤️❤️