#20: The Rapture of Metals
This week: Seeing the Anthropocene with Edward Burtynsky // Virtual production at the Superbowl // Five key reads on digital creativity // Plus Museum Next 2024 and WAC Weekly...
So we hit twenty.
Twenty weeks of trying to tie and untie the knots between new creativity and emerging technology.
I’ve learnt a massive amount from doing this so far. And to those who are keeping pace, thank you. It means a lot.
Next week, we’ll take a pause for breath and summarise the ideas and themes we’ve looked at over the last five months.
But that’s next week. Today, let’s dive in. As ever, there’s a lot to talk about.
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Art! // Seeing the Anthropocene at the Saatchi Gallery
This is a big week for exhibitions about the relationship between art and technology in London.
Refik Anadol, superstar of digital art, opened on Thursday at the Serpentine and tickets are already going fast.
Go see it.
But make sure you see Edward Burtynsky at the Saatchi Gallery as well. It is a phenomenal insight into the world we’ve made, and new ways to see it.
Burtynsky is a Canadian photographer who photographs the edges of the world caused by advanced industrial production. Largely taken from very high viewpoints, these shots of what mining, food, salt and other kinds of mass production look like in the twenty-first century is a stark reminder of how deeply technologised everything we make is. Like Rem Koolhaas’ brilliant Countryside project I talked about back in issue 11, it is not cities which are our strangest, most inhuman domains. It is the natural world, forced to order by industry which houses the strangest, most hostile spaces on this planet.
We are a long way past Blake’s dark satanic mills here, of simple scars upon historic landscapes, and into a world that is new and alien. And seen from on-high, this alien world we’ve made takes on something of the character of abstract expressionism, or of Kandinsky.
That connection back to painting is the show’s curatorial angle, and Burtynsky’s riff on art history. It’s well made across a vast show. The weird geometries of human-made irrigation rivulets criss-crossing the landscape, of Portugese quarries that become like the upside down skyscrapers in Inception, or perfect circular patches of farmable life in the arid Saudi desert, take on the character of brush-strokes.
That’s a harsh, bitter but powerful point - the artist’s mark upon canvas a metaphor for the damage we’re carving into the surface of the earth. Burtynsky, I think, makes us see human endeavour, enhanced by advanced technologies, as a destructive form of creativity.
But what I think makes Burtynsky so powerful is that he doesn’t see this world and turn away. This is not a plea to return to a rural idyll now utterly gone. His art is as much an outcome of advanced technology as the breaking world he documents.
Burtynsky takes photos of incredible size, using the very highest end 150 mega pixel cameras made by Phase One.
This size and scale of imaging is rarely used for art - rather it’s the domain of national security agencies, telecoms, energy and infrastructure companies.
The same agencies who have transformed the natural world into this weird alien abstraction are the ones who’ve caused the creation of the technology that allows it to be seen.
Burtynsky stands brilliantly between those two points, between nature broken by technology, and the technology’s own revelatory promise.
And in so doing he reminds us that technology is both the cause of our great global problems, and the path to their resolution.
Go see.
Your must-do in Web 3 // WAC Weekly
This month I’m totally delighted to have WAC Weekly as newsletter partners.
WAC Weekly is THE best place to keep up with what’s going on as Web 3 meets the Art ecosystem. A weekly call every Wednesday at 6 CET, it has an amazing revolving cast of speakers and projects.
It’s run by old friend and major maven, Diane Drubay. Register now - this season has a couple more months to run.
And look out for some exclusive content I’m making for Diane and WAC Labs over the coming weeks.
Ideas! // This week’s five key reads
Here’s five must-read articles this week:
Casey Newton on what the Taylor Swift deepfakes tell us about the toxic combination of AI and social media
This Northern Dimension Partnership policy briefing on art and design based innovation and collaboration is a great deep dive into how the new gets made
This piece on the most popular artist on Tik-Tok, Devon Rodriguez, is an excellent look at how social media is creating a parallel art market out of views and clicks
And if you’ve read that, read this on the forgotten music artists exploding back to fame because of Tik-Tok
And last but not least, a guide to how legendary game Deus Ex rearchitected global cities on the excellent Parametric Architecture
Museum Next Live 2024 // Speaker Announcement
I’m super happy to announce that I’ll be speaking at this year’s Museum Next Live in London not once … but twice.
You can catch me on day one talking with NIMI CEO Anh Nguyen on NFTs and the future of museum membership and donor programmes. Then on day three, I’ll be speaking on the Immersive Institution, six month’s on from telling its story in The Art Newspaper.
Like Remix Summits, speaking at Museum Next has been a key part of my journey through art, culture and technology. This will be my third (plus a Culture Geek, also run by the excellent Jim Richardson).
The second was a surreal experience, Jim and I talking in NGX in what was both his and my first day out after Covid Lockdown.
It’s a conversation I’m still proud of, a useful story about a very weird time.
Can’t wait til June!
Technology! // Virtual Production at the Superbowl
The release of Open AI’s Sora, a next step in text-to-video AI has been the big story in creative technology this week.
I’ll come back to this in future weeks - as impressive as it is, until I get the chance to play with it directly, I can’t get that excited.
But what I did find exciting was this breakdown of the camera technology used by CBS in this year’s Superbowl.
Take a watch of this video.
Sports is an incredible domain for innovation in different kinds of image capture. The sheer array of different ways of looking here - super slow-motion, drone, pylon, shallow-depth of field, and on and on - shows just how far the sport we watch on TV is from any notion of the “real”. It’s a dazzling reinterpretation, happening in real-time at different speeds and intensities.
The new layer in this year’s match is the augmented reality cameras that turned Spongebob into an on-field commentator as the show was simulcast on Nickelodeon. The broadening of the Superbowl audience that the whole Swift-Kelce story brought about, has its technological match in providing a new entry point to the game for younger audiences.
What’s so interesting about the way sports responds to new technology is the way it organically absorbs new kinds of visualisation into its stack. Both last year’s Superbowl in Arizona, and Superbowl 50 back in 2016 had around 100 cameras - so this year has marked a significant leap forward.
But where does this go next?
My guess is that the next wave of imaging which I’ve been covering week on week here on Creative R&D will form part of the next stage innovations in sports broadcasting.
We’re already seeing real-time motion and volume capture of players to transform them in cartoon characters or allow games to be watched from any angle inside virtual environments. That’s been an experiment this year.
I’d 100% expect to see a Superbowl inside Fortnite within 3 years. I can’t imagine that conversation isn’t already taking place.
And with the rise of NERF’s and Gaussian Splatters I’ve covered before, and the power of LIDAR 3D scanning, instant 3D modelling, the translation of bodies into objects provides a step on from super-slow mo I’d love to see.
That’s just the Superbowl. There’s much more to come in sports. I’m writing this with Avatar: Way of Water on in the background and its extraordinary water-based sequences, cameras capturing real and virtual motion moving in and out of the water, were made with new camera technology that will commoditise into new ways to see swimming, surfing, kayaking and more. With the Olympics to come this year, we may see first glimpses of that.
I’m with the Ancient Greeks on sport. It’s as critical a part of the human fabric as art, politics and philosophy.
It’s also the place where new creative approaches to technology get co-opted fastest.
Keep watching. 😎
This week’s title // The Rapture of Metals
The Rapture of Metals is an early 90s album by experimental ambient producer Paul Schutze. There was a - brief - trend called Isolationism, broadly, dark edged ambient, that I got very into whilst doing my A Levels. Weird noisescapes, drones. Fun stuff.
Paul Schutze was the best of that cluster of artists. He sounds a lot like the world Burnytsky photographs - a guided tour of a strange alien nature full of threat and dangerous beauty.
Good stuff.
Interestingly, Paul now makes perfumes.
See you next week.
❤️❤️❤️