What Can Technology Do for Art?
Reflections on 美: Chapter 7 “Art & Technology”
As Amaël pointed out in his exciting article “Global Art for a Connected World”, the mesmerizing world of technology, and the Internet in particular, provides ample room for artists to expand their creative minds to a whole new level. It allows an ordinary fifteen-year-old to become the creator of a photo series that makes thousands of people go crazy or brings two young businessmen together who strive to reach the ambitious goal of changing the way stories are told.
These are the stories of the guests for 美 Chapter 7. The stories of: Eytan Levi, the co-founder of Humans of Paris; and, Ben Watanabe and Dave Branson Smith, storytellers of 96problems.
When he was a high-school sophomore, Eytan Levi saw the page for Humans of New York for the first time. It was a much smaller project at the time, but he immediately perceived its potential and thought that if he would not bring it into France, someone else would. After a quick decision, he and his friends took out their hobby cameras and sailed out to the city of Paris to start their unique “photographical survey” of the French capital and its inhabitants. Eytan spent his weekends wandering around the different neighborhoods of Paris and interviewing strangers he met on the streets.
Now, two years later, Humans of Paris has grown to a page with over 300,000 likes (wow!), and has become the second most popular Humans of series in the world (you can check out here some other famous Humans of series). But Eytan did not come all the way to Komaba to brag about his success; rather, he came to tell us about the pros and cons of technology he discovered and why he ultimately decided to leave the project.
The advantages of internet-based technology that Eytan mentioned were not surprising. The internet allowed him to reach a wide audience and greatly increased the visibility of his work, while still permitting a very, very small budget. Using equipment they already had and a free Facebook page as their launchpad, Eytan and his team spent $0 in total to maintain the page. Here we can see the myth of a “starving artist” fall apart.
The shortcomings and limitations he pointed out were, however, quite insightful, since there are things you do not see until you are professionally involved in the virtual world. Yet in the midst of it all, Eytan realised that there was still an unmovable group of people that still craved something more physical. As Humans of Paris grew to be more and more popular, fans started to want a book or an exhibition, which is not a big problem if you’re a bigwig backed with sponsors, but for smaller artist groups a leap from virtual to real is fatal. The Internet gives an opportunity to all, but it does not mean that it creates an equal and impartial utopia. In addition, your physical location actually matters too, which is a sad fact when you imagine the Internet as something that gives power to anyone, no matter where you are and where you are from. These doubts and disappointments, alongside the burden of fame (not surprisingly maintaining such a big webpage limited Eytan’s creativity) essentially led him to step away from Humans of Paris.
Unlike Etyan’s, Ben and Dave’s story is just beginning. These two passionate American entrepreneurs were navigating through totally different careers until they met three years ago here in Tokyo. What brought them together was their shared trust and curiosity in technology, start-up businesses and art. Based on their tech and business experience, they believe technology can present new art forms to the world on a large scale, therefore they are now experimenting with “creative new ways to enjoy literature”.
These ambitious tech investors see themselves as a modern Medici family: patrons that provide great artists around the world with the means to feed themselves. In the old days, writers needed power to physically bring people to stores where their books were sold and even today they struggle to bring readers to their Amazon page. Their project, launched through an app called LongShorts Stories, is trying to liberate stories from the confinement of two covers or a kindle, and allow them to live everywhere, to spread all over the place, to float. The stories will be delivered to you through twitter and an app, from different characters in real time, i.e., the messages arriving as if they corresponded with the occurrence of events happening in the real world. It is a new way to tell new stories and also a new way to retell old stories, such as Dracula.
What Ben and Dave are aiming to do is to challenge the notion that reading requires a big coherent chunk of time. This is probably the main reason why us busy Homo Futuruses don’t spend more time reading, but that is now a problem of the past. With LongShorts Stories, stories come to you in little pieces like a puzzle. You literally live together with your favorite characters. Some of us might wonder; isn’t that just one more thing that entraps us in the “like addiction”, more endlessly flowing Facebook posts and Twitter timelines? Well yes, in a sense, but Ben and Dave are aware of that, thus their goal is to create a stronger signal and to provide something that people find meaningful, something deeper than just “online junk food”.
Returning to the point about “location matters” brought up by Eytan, why did Ben and Dave choose Tokyo as their creative playground? Their answer was quite surprising considering that Tokyo is the world’s largest city: they wanted to find it a quiet place, a getaway from all the distracting noise. For them, Tokyo is an easy to slow down and focus on what they are doing. An hermitage from a boisterous society is what every artist needs at some point, but who could imagine Tokyo as one? Also, they say Tokyo is a very supportive environment for those who want to make something new and crazy, and Japan in particular seems to be ready for what our guests are trying to do. After all, this is a country that invented manga, and mobile-phone novels known as “Ketai-Shosetsu” (ケータイ小説) rapidly gained popularity with the younger generation.
After their talk was over, I couldn’t help but think that these two speakers are real professional salesmen… (after all, as Andy Warhol once said “being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art”) they did not explain how exactly their program works, leaving me with all kinds of questions and forcing me to visit their website and even download the app! I strongly recommend anyone who is at all interested to do the same, because it will open up a whole new world for you, a world that bookworms never even imagined. Here you will find a taste of what technology can do to art. Then again, the Humans of Paris page will do the same.
The world is changing and sometimes it seems there is not a lot of space left for us artists in a this mass-producing, capitalist society, but hey, maybe it is time to change our minds.
