A thought experiment: think of a group or individual who developed a work of art, in a traditional artistic discipline and after the turn of the millennium, that led to a social movement.
Difficult, isn’t it?
Art seems to have lost its power since the turn of the millennium. The position of art in the cultural, political and societal debate seems to have been taken over by the virtual world. Consequently, convulsions of traditional art forms can be seen everywhere. According to author Simon Reynolds, the music industry finds itself in a state of retromania: tribute bands, reunion tours and album remakes now define the musical landscape. A similar trend is visible in the film industry, with sequels and remakes of films of bygone times and stories of old heroes — irrelevant, desperate attempts to restore what’s lost.
There’s an elephant in the room. The internet-driven technologization of society has taken over the position that art used to have.
New creative thinkers make different types of works. Works based on software.
Digital Native
As a kid I developed a fascination for art and for computers. During my high school years, I taught myself programming and making music. As a ‘right brainer’, I had soon made my choice about what to study: I enrolled in a conservatory, while already earning money with making software. After earning my bachelor’s degree I went to study in the US for some time, still continuing the software business, and I started thinking about which career path to take in the nearby future. And just then I started to see the interconnectedness of it all. I started to realize that the creative vanguard, which I so desperately wanted to become part of, was not embedded in the traditional artistic disciplines, but in the technological realm. Long story short: New creative thinkers make different types of works. Works based on software.
Traditionally, artistic disciplines like theatre, music, dance, film, design, architecture, and others, used technology as a means to an artistic goal. But nowadays, these disciplines have become the means to a technological artistic goal. Examples are the self composing neural network of Daniel Johnson, the algorithm-developing universe in the game No Man’s Sky, or The Grid, a design process controlled by artificial intelligence.
The boundaries between art, design, engineering and science are slowly disappearing, and new creative means of expression emerge. The big difference with traditional artistic disciplines is that the art is in the software itself. Not in the lines of code, but in the sum of these lines combined, interacting on the Internet. It seemed so obvious, but it took me some time to see that software and the Internet are a form of ultimate aesthetic abstraction.
This has huge implications. It would mean that aesthetics, the traditional arena of arts, is evolving into a more omnipresent, abstract, virtual energy that surrounds us.
The impact of the avant-garde
Some say that dissolving borders between art, design, engineering and science are a consequence of the underestimated impact of the avant-garde on our society. (See for example the works of Krzysztof Ziarek, or the research on antidiscipline by Joi Ito at the MIT lab.) The shift caused by the avant-garde seems to not only question where aesthetics begins and ends, but also whether aesthetics has a role at all in contemporary art.
Of course it’s not uncommon for certain art forms to have less impact in certain eras compared to others. However, what’s remarkable about the 2000s is that no traditional art form has generated the same impact that technology has. In the years to come we will see whether traditional art disciplines will present innovative concepts in a tech guise, or whether technology will become an autonomous, brand new discipline that might even change the definition of aesthetics forever.
The Internet, aesthetic necessity and autonomous thinking
Many people think that the Internet itself will be the first entity that thinks autonomously in a way that is comparable to the way humans think. The question is whether such an entity will also have the urge to search for beauty through aesthetics as we know it. Maybe this entity, through its perfection, will make the quest for beauty obsolete. Nonetheless, there are also people who evade this question altogether by saying it’s an impossible, or even unnecessary thing to think about right now. Paraphrasing researcher Andrew Ng: “… there is a big difference between intelligence and autonomy. I don’t worry about these types of AI’s, the same way I don’t worry about overpopulation on Mars”.
The fact remains, however, that through the speed of development and innovation in technology, the virtual world has taken over the position that once belonged to the arts. A position from where one can steer aesthetic, social, political, cultural and societal developments.
Written by: Bob van Luijt
Editor: Renate Roze
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This is a translation of an article originally published in the Dutch cultural magazine MESTmag.nl.
