The Future of Art.
Capturing Humanity Through Technology
As technology stealthily advances the possibilities of art, artists are interacting and participating with art more than ever.
It is no longer the division between the left brain (science) versus the right brain (art) but the marriage of the two that will become the future.
From the earliest discoveries of fire to modern computing devices and cloud-based software, humans have bent and leveraged technology in creative ways to express themselves and connect with each other and the wider world around them.
Fire didn’t just keep us warm, it enabled us to cook food and invent new tools. It also allowed people to turn clay into hardened ceramic pots and vases, useful for carrying and storing food, water, or other items, which were then shaped and decorated in ways beyond functional use.
Today like never before, technology allows everyday people to express their passions for humanity through creative endeavors by A) fueling new art forms, B) enabling far more people with a variety of tools to express themselves creatively, and C) scaling the ability to share, display and connect with a global community.
Photography
Today photographs are the most widespread, human-created, and distributed art form.
They’ve been turbocharged by camera phones bursting with megapixels and what seems like magical software sent from the gods. The images are then scaled and distributed via social media feeds algorithmically and optimized to maximize engagement.
We’ve come a long way from Ansel Adams with his stationary and cumbersome camera and the portable film Leica used by the great photojournalists and photographers in the latter half of the 20th Century.
However, some folks pine for the days of old.
They need not pine since they can still use their large format camera, loaded with black and white film, and wait for the perfect moment. But their efforts will pale in comparison to someone using a modern digital Leica Q2 or M10 or even an iPhone12 Pro Max and then fine-tuning the result in Adobe Lightroom.
Ansel Adams spent hours optimizing photographs in a dark room. If he were alive today, he would probably be an expert at Photoshop.
While technology enables the possibility and potential of artists, it does not necessarily make an artist. Similarly, the refusal to leverage modern possibilities and hold to traditional ways does not cause one to be a more “genuine artist.”
2. Film
The film industry often encounters the battle between “the way it was and should be” versus the future.
Not only is the movie theater increasingly a thing of the past, but the two-to-three-hour film itself is no longer the only method of modern film expression. Its extinction is eminent.
A case can be made that in today’s streaming eco-system, artists working in film have far greater means of expressing and creating their art than when they were limited to the movie and television studios of the past. Why be constrained to three hours when the better idea may be a series — Queens Gambit was originally a movie idea. Why be limited to what can be viewed in a few theatres when artists can reach a global audience via Netflix or Hulu?
The ability to determine how to release one’s work — weekly, all at once, or in a series, allows for creative freedom and has created a new HIGH ART FORM of film versus movies.
Most theatrical movies are now commercials for the eco-system of spinoffs and merchandise that follows. And many of the truly artistic films, which may be more edgy, risky, and artistic, from Roma to The Irishman to One Night in Miami, are now funded and launched by streaming channels. They are not crushing but unleashing creativity like never before.
A reason “The Mandalorian” on Disney+ has resonated so well is the fact that it has the space to build its world and story versus being Star Wars 10: The Emergence of Yoda.
Not surprisingly, talent is rushing to streaming, and companies like Disney, are blowing kisses to the theater industry.
With larger and less expensive OLED screens, surround sound, and improvements in programming discovery, the home theater has become an even better experience than sitting in a movie theater.
Sadly, theaters' only advancements have morphed into restaurants and bars to socialize and go out on date night with a film on the side.
3. Music
While there is a recent resurgence in vinyl among the diehard aficionados, the future of music is also streaming.
Most of the joy of vinyl is in the ritual rather than the result. There is a certain joy in placing vinyl on a turntable, perusing the liner notes, and appreciating the art of the cover. Then there’s the romanticizing of the imperfect crackling and hisses that add nostalgia to the listening experience. It touches our human soul like no other medium.
However, even past tech innovators like McIntosh, with its old-fashioned transistor quality, foresaw the future and began releasing sophisticated gear with glowing green dials optimized for headphones connected to digital music.
Streaming music via Tidal (much higher quality than Spotify) with a great pair of Apple Airpods and a digital amp is absolutely amazing.
The benefits of streaming include convenience and catalog depth and the curation of community provided by the artists themselves.
Bandcamp and Soundcloud are two excellent sources for a different independent and less commercial take on music than Spotify and Apple Music.
To understand the power of how modern technology can unleash and enable music, check out the Digital Concert Hall of the Berlin Philharmonic, which among other things, has one of the best user interfaces and discovery engines I’ve experienced. Unfortunately, most of the functionality requires a subscription that I would highly recommend, even if for just a month, to understand what is truly possible truly.
What makes the Digital Concert Hall so smart is that when the new physical orchestra hall was built in Berlin, it was built not just to optimize sound for the live audience but to record high-quality audio and video from multiple angles for home subscribers and streaming audiences. As a result, you feel as if you’re sitting in the orchestra hall, watching and hearing the music in ways never possible in the past.
Because of their foresight, the Berlin Philharmonic continues to reach music enthusiasts and their subscribers globally, even though the challenges of Covid-19, as they play to an empty orchestra hall.
And for the aspiring Mozarts and Dylan’s of the world, there are new ways to learn how to play instruments. For instance, to understand the depth of what is possible, cruise over to Truefire Studios.
4. The Written Word
Before photography, film, and recorded music came print — physical newspapers, magazines, and books. The first two are in deep decline, while the book continues to grow and prosper.
After being continuously diminished in size, newspapers and magazines had been increasingly replaced by their digital counterparts, while the book has been complemented rather than replaced by its audible and electronic representations.
Why has listening to vinyl and reading a book continued to grow? Maybe because the two formats allow for unplugging so one can immerse themselves in a world of imagination. Or is it the ability to underline sentences and scribble in the margins something difficult to replicate in a digital format? Or is it that when you are reading a book, you are both everywhere and nowhere? Is it possible that its silence soothes our soul in a world of physical chaos? Or can it simply be that books make great artifacts to decorate a room or office or signal educational status and taste?
While the book continues to prosper, its authors have also broken the past boundaries with new formats, including blogging platforms like WordPress and Medium.
These are some of the on-ramps for emerging talent and off-ramps for established talent to and from the world of newspapers, magazines, and books.
5. Museums.
The world’s greatest museums are no longer in Paris, New York, Chicago, London, or Florence. They are in the Cloud, and probably the best portal into the amazing world is Google Art and Culture Page .Openculture.org is another great portal.
Here, the full power of modern technology supports and promotes, and celebrates art with its culture fully on display. Tech also allows us to walk through museums and get a microscopic look (in high-def) at a piece of art, enabling us to rotate, zoom in, look at different angles, and much more.
It also allows us to travel across the world to experience and observe the outer landscapes of the world’s most iconic museums and travel through the intricate halls and experience the massive scope of all the art that lives within the space.
Yes, virtual experiences do not replace a visit to a museum.
It may have surpassed it!
And for most of the world, it will be the only way they get to a museum.
6. Humane Digital Media.
Digital is like hydrochloric acid.
It burns through all boundaries.
This is true in art.
Podcasts: Take the intimacy of the print medium and marry it with digital sound and access to cloud-based delivery. You then have an amazing podcast.
TikTok: Take modern AI, the ubiquity of the mobile phone, and combine it with people's creativity, and you have a fast-growing, highly addictive, new social media platform called TikTok.
New York Times Digital: Take world-class journalism and photography, then combine them with digital artists, editors, and developers, then remove the physical piece, and you have New York Times Digital.
Gaming: Take hardware, software, film, music, and storytelling, then fuse them together, and you get the 165 billion dollar gaming industry larger than the film, music, and publishing businesses combined.
Jimmy Nelson’s Homage to Humanity
Take a world-class photographer who ventures miles into the wilderness to photograph a disappearing heritage with heavy large format cameras and combine him with a nine-person digital team, and you a have a mix of book, video, music, and virtual reality that takes a book to where no book could go, and to places you didn’t know existed while creating art that refuses to accept limits.
Take the journey…
Our
Future does not live within confined spaces of the past.
Today’s art transcends global boundaries through modern hardware and software plumbing.
It is the Human connection of art and meaning that this plumbing enables a life worth living.
Let us not focus so much on the plumbing that we forget the poetry.