Creative Calgary Congress — Exploring ways that the arts and artists can play a leadership role in making Calgary a more curious, compassionate and creative place for all citizens.
The Artist and Professor — Patrick Finn
We live in the midst of the largest change in technology in human history. All of the rules of the game have changed.
The research is clear: If we don’t know how networked information works, our work suffers.
Through the Looking Glass: Why our World Feels Different
Dr. Patrick Finn is an active artist and academic who studies performance: how it works, what constitutes excellence in performance, and what performance studies offer our daily lives. He is an Associate Professor in the School of Creative and Performing Arts, and Computational Media Design at The University of Calgary, and Chair of Research and Innovation at The Edmonton Digital Arts College.
Intro
I am an artist. I study creativity and performance. The research is clear: If we don’t know how networked information works, our work suffers. It’s a big challenge with many solutions. So consider — a cultural melting pot promotes conformity in service of an industrial approach to life. A cultural mosaic is more like a network. A mosaic is a collection of tiles but focusing on the individual beauty of the tiles does not capture the power of the network. Look to the glue. Glue makes a mosaic. How do we activate a mosaic? We each carry the answers. A performance created by some people who are here offers a great example — the phrase we are all treaty people. That’s glue. My session explores the answers each of you carries and how they work.
Open Session #1
I have a much different perspective than Jim Dewald shared this morning. I believe that this is the greatest moment of change that the human species has ever experienced. Jim, while speaking from the business perspective, paraphrased Peter Thiel and said, “They promised us flying cars and all we got is 140 characters.” My response would be: Donald Trump didn’t need a flying car to take the most powerful office on the planet, he used 144 characters. We are in the information age and everything has changed and is continuing to change at a greater and greater rate.
Technology is central to the work we do and not understanding how technology operates puts us at a disadvantage.
The last industrial model of education created people who were functionally literate and functionally capable but not necessarily able to think creatively.
Technology Favours Diversity
The more diverse we are the more powerful our network becomes. We are seeing tipping points. An emphasis on collaboration further diversifies the network and makes it stronger. We have to move to a model of collaborative practice. There is no me or you. The idea that we are separate is a way of knowing of the world, but how we work together in a diverse environment in service of something good is meaningful.
Digital technology is a language and a way of writing things down. The digital allows us to write anything down because the language is entirely untethered. We can create anything.
Steve Jobs noticed people working together and it is what changed the way he worked. He believed that the best work happened when diverse people connected and collaborated. For example, when computer scientists and artists worked together, it was their differences that made the work stronger. It is critical to preserve diversity.
Our traditional educational model gets you to take off your rough edges so you fit into the model (work/life). In the past they trained us to be more like the instructor. The new model is how do we maintain as much diversity as possible and work together towards a goal.
Harvard has now changed their education system to include one full year computer programming course for every student.
Questions and Comments from Participants:
Is language less of a barrier when using technology? If language is a unifier, how does that tie in to spreading new creative ideas?
In the tech world there is a lot of talk around coding. What is cultural coding? Could this be a bridge to connect us? We know what computer coders are but what are cultural coders?
Is it about the way we connect through tech platforms? Calgarians’ number one value is a sense of belonging. Could technology be a way to increase that sense of belonging? Could artists be at the heart of that by connecting to these cultural coders?
Patrick: When you go through a change like the one we are in now, people get tripped up because they are trying to analyze new technology with old analytical methods of communication. Even the way we speak of coding needs to be examined. Coding is not a metaphor, it’s the primary literacy of the world today. A lot of people’s work is being undercut by not understanding the game they are in — an information age game. So, many people are working hard, but if they aren’t able to shift their understanding of how these deep structures work they are just spinning their wheels. We are working in a world in which we don’t understand how the structures work. That’s not our fault: the change happened so fast that we were not taught the literacy we need. We have to play catch-up, but it’s an exciting opportunity.
Participant: Or is there a lack of understanding from the structures that are emerging? For example, Mark Zuckerberg’s understanding or lack thereof of Facebook’s impact on the election in the US with all of the fake news?
Work in behavioural design has been implemented for structuring the way media outlets choose what they air or publish. The CBC, Fox, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, Global, NBC etc all use the same formula. Facebook uses a modification of this same formula in order to achieve its goal of having Facebook used more and more. This means so-called “mainstream media” frames our world in a certain way. Media, to be effective, must hire folks with an understanding of new technology and those who consume it must be trained in its formal workings.
Why is this important? Look at the alt-right movement. These folks are up on technology.
These new platforms are manipulating us and assuming we don’t have free will, so we spend more time on them. (i.e. Facebook). Some of the best minds in the world are focusing their efforts on ways to keep us looking at their pages longer than we would if we were making the choice ourselves. We often hear this referred to as creating “sticky eyeballs.”
Remember how computers were supposed to make our lives easier? It has done the opposite. It creates access to individuals 24 hours a day. The information age structure likes generative data. It gets hungrier for more data. Just think of how many surveys you get asked to respond to these days. The data machine is a hungry beast and it gets hungry with every feeding.
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are powerful. If you know how they work you can use those platforms to get people to click away more of their rights. If you look at what happened with the Hamilton cast, Pence and Trump played these media forms to distract from other issues (note: since this presentation a number of articles have been written about this subject).
Some people are using platforms that are democratic in a way that is not beautiful.
Our Lack of Understanding is our Biggest Problem
If you can acknowledge we have been in the biggest change of how knowledge is disseminated, you can see that our lack of understanding of it is our biggest problem.
It was brilliant how Beyoncé created and conducted her performance at the Super Bowl last year. She connected multiple groups, themes and historical moments (including the Black Panthers, Black Lives Matter, and MLK) into the middle of the Superbowl and had people cheering. She released the released a new disc as part of the same moment, but she also had set up connections with community groups like BLM to be ready to respond once she provoked the audience. It’s a blending of marketing, politics, performance and media. She and her team know how these structures work and it was masterful.
Both republicans and democrats have developed programs to implement so-called guaranteed income… This is because technology is going to wipe out a huge number of jobs and they are going to have to respond.
The nostalgia of Bernie Sanders saying let’s go back to old socialism is a response to not understanding the structure and where we have to go, so we go back to the old way. What was new was his ability to connect through information age technology — not just in the use of Twitter, but in attention to how messaging has to work in that form. Donald Trump did the same thing, but from a position of a nostalgia for a past conservative America.
Open Session #2
I believe the nature of how we communicate is the biggest change we have seen in history. When we change the way we structure knowledge it changes everything.
The impact can be compared to the way everything was changed with the printing press. The challenge for us is that we are in a perfect storm because of the way our educational system trained us. As pointed out by the scholar Mark Poster, we are at a moment where those people with degrees in tech and engineering have little exposure to arts and culture classes, and those who study humanities and arts take very few math and tech classes. It leaves us completely unprepared to directly engage with the information age. That’s not a bad thing, and it’s already changing, but as the last — at least I hope the last! — generation to be trained in the industrial age model of education, we are left to address the fact that our education perfectly prepares us for a world that no longer exists.
The old industrial structure is better for hierarchy and control. The new structure is better for constant collaboration and diversity.
Everything we do is deeply impacted by that system of organization. Being aware of that should have direct impact on our work. We aren’t just talking about computers; we are talking about how information and knowledge are organized.
Anyone who has knowledge about how contemporary media works can take advantage of us even if we think we are more knowledgeable or more intelligent than they are about content and analysis.
This has direct impact on issues we are passionate about but if we don’t know how the game is played our efforts are not as effective as they could be.
This is about a time for collaboration, and the separation model cannot work. So, how do we collaborate constantly?
Let’s look at the US election. The result was tied into communication.
Why couldn’t Hillary act the same way as Trump? Her 10,000 hours are in policy and many people thought that should make her a shoe-in. It almost certainly would have in an industrial age election structure. Donald Trump’s 10,000 hours are in popular media. Thus, he has more primary training and experience in media-age work.
In order to be efficient we need to know how the game is played. The far right has developed into a digitally-literate group (alt-right is literally a phrase drawn from information technology). If you are not aware of that, it puts you at a disadvantage that makes it hard to even understand. If you don’t understand how it works it can be used against you.
Beyoncé’s performance at the Superbowl was secondary to the full impact of her message. She worked with community organizations and released her record the day before so everyone was setup for the performance. The power she was able to bring to her messaging was extraordinary. This was a media savvy way to use her art form to advance her message, and to sell her products, it’s a blended model that is also a marker of our age. So, how do we ensure these methods are not used against us?
Understanding how the technology works is a key issue on these things. This doesn’t mean everyone has to sit down and learn programming language, it just means we need to understand how it works.
Participant: I’ve been thinking a lot post-election of how I’m in my own fishbowl and looking at what I’m coming up against. When I see a piece of art I like, it’s very comfortable but when I see something I don’t like, it makes me uncomfortable. But that’s when I grow, when the greatest amount of growth happens. So in thinking about post-Trump, the media I paid attention to all said he was going to lose and Hillary was going to win. So now people I know are starting to pay more attention to alt-right media to see where things might go. That makes me uncomfortable. But I realize that the discomfort of going into the other side is where stuff starts to happen.
Let’s look at a famous example: There was a big change when Nixon debated Kennedy in 1960. That’s when they said ok, now politics is about television. Those who listened to the debate on the radio said that Nixon had won, but the television audience declared Kennedy the winner. At that time — the time of industrial, broadcast media — it was assumed that if you did the national debates and won them that was pretty much the election. It was a public demonstration of your ability to claim the truth. If you think about what that means, it means the country was assumed to have received the same message, they were all in that message stream together, and they were going to make their minds up based on that information. We had different perspectives, but the media stream was the same.
Information nowadays is in all sorts of bubbles and clusters and there is no shared stream. It means that the attempt to criticize or evaluate from one bubble to another is illogical. That is how big the transformation is. That is why if you tweet something out it works so well, and does not require the same logical coherence — all you need is to get people to retweet it, and it rains down on all those separate bubbles creating a powerful message. That is how you get dissemination today.
In the old big model you’ve got a message coming in and you are trained to look at it, criticize it, analyze it, maybe debate about it — but it’s a linear way of being. In this new model worrying about trying to evaluate all the stuff that’s out there and exposing yourself to all that stuff could be corrosive. So, merely looking at two streams: Conservative and liberal is just a variation on the old theme. That’s what old critics did, they all read all the papers and watched all the feeds to get a balanced view. But you cannot balance a multiplicity of information modules.
Beyoncé gave us an example of how an artist, in a world where information has become so important, has the potential to be highly influential. Look also to social movements: When there was beginning to be this dismissive thing from mainstream media with Black Lives Matter, that group was ready with a set of research documents supporting what they were doing. They were ready because they knew what was coming. They were ready to push their movement forward.
Keeping Busy vs Doing Work
What I worry about with technology is that the left has gotten really good at cultural criticism. A lot of talk without action. This type of technology likes to keep you busy. It keeps you on a platform longer than you intend and you end up doing meaningless work. This is taking artists away from doing their art. I’d rather they took time to work on their art. The more time artists are spending on their art the better the world will be.
Take the old Nietzschean argument — you become who you fight — it’s easy to bait people into argument and keep them arguing in a space that has no impact. And while you’re spending time in an argument inside an echo chamber that only your friends can hear, I can be doing all kinds of things that have real world impact. For example, the announcement of Mike Pence going to Hamilton and sitting in the front row was a brilliant media move. Trump was facing a Friday news dump that was massive, and they wanted it out of the way. He had previously talked about how you distract and that’s exactly what he did. He suckered them into responding. Those are wonderful artists doing good theatre work — and this guy was able to game them out of what they were doing — leaving their art — to fight back from the stage.
So, I worry about you thinking you need to spend more time in these places because you think you need to be better informed. Maybe the truth isn’t in that matrix. I would say don’t spend more time reading news, do less news and more art and more actual work. The evidence is that all of the best pundits were wrong, the academics had it wrong, and now we keep listening to them as they critically analyze why everyone got it wrong. And so the idea of expanding our exposure to that seems to me to be ridiculous. We have too much overall information and too little quality information.
What We Need is Artists Making Art
Let’s get stuff out there that makes the world a better place. Let’s use the network for things that are powerful because yet another rant is not as powerful to me as a beautiful performance piece. It’s not as powerful as a poem, it’s not as powerful as a song or an image. So let’s inundate the world with beauty, art, aesthetics, interesting new ideas rather than staying on these forums that are structurally designed to keep us there longer than we would like to.
This is a game that people who are interested in community or diversity or equity and justice can win quite easily. The great news is that this forum is organic and responds to diversity better than the old model.
Participant: My big question is who’s not included at the table? Where does the artist go within the information technology space so that the work doesn’t take a lot of income to go see or a certain level of education to experience? How can we ensure it’s accessible on many levels and to many people?
Whenever we select any technology in order to communicate we have to give up time we would spend on other things. So, when we got books it was great because then everyone could read, but with that technology it was expensive to have pictures so there were fewer images. Thus, we were less visually and more textually attuned. That was a sort of a narrowing feature. But this new model, by definition, works better with diversity of all kinds rather than uniformity: because it’s networked. The more diversity the stronger the network, so it’s inherently predisposed to allowing diversity to thrive and to minimize hierarchical structure, whether that be in the form of media expression (image, video, text, etc.) or the content of message, or the identity of those expressing themselves.
Artists are perfectly suited to deal with this because artists are already used to a type of dynamism not inherent in the old structures. People talk about how we have to get used to taking risks and get used to embracing failure but artists have always been doing this, they don’t need to change at all.
We don’t want to have a lot of lecturing to tell artists what to do. We just need to set them free and learn from them. They are perfectly suited to lead us at this time. We need to make sure people have ways to develop excellence, develop craft, and get some training because when you get high level training you’re more likely to have impact. So, when we think of political objectives consider this: why do we change policies to support more diversity? Because that’s what would make better art. More voices, more viewpoints not only addresses political ends, it makes better art. The network responds to diversity and connection.
Let’s make the argument from the most ruthless, elitist perspective — say that all I care about is the best art. That requires ruthless competition. How do we introduce ruthless competition into the system right now? By taking your foot off the neck of women, minorities, and Indigenous populations for a start. We have the potential to make the greatest art that has ever been created because more of us can be involved, but we need to ask these questions about how we can do it. I believe we can be more effective if we get better informed on the way this knowledge works. That said, we don’t need to do anything, the information age is making all of these changes for us, our decision is whether we want to be a part of it, or be those who are left behind while the world catches up to the information age (which started in the 1940s and 50s by the way).
The new model needs a breadth of voices. You need the entire ecosystem. Let’s look at a concreted example: The Own the Podium program we created in Canadian amateur sport. We didn’t do well in the Olympics and we decided we wanted to do better. How do you do that? To have more Olympians, you need more athletes in all areas. You need an ecosystem. You need kids to start playing sports young, and then have systems to support them at a variety of levels. There needs to be room in the ecosystem for all these folks. In the same way, the more of us that play piano, the more great pianists we will produce. Not everyone will become Glenn Gould, but everyone in the ecosystem is inspired by Gould’s work. In the same way, I look at Usain Bolt and am inspired. I love to run, but I would never have been able to achieve anywhere near what he has, but his work inspires me, it does not make me feel worse. Complex ecosystems necessary for great work create various levels of expression that are good for society as a whole.
We need to create more responsibility and opportunity for artists to create and collaborate with those who have the expertise in technology and dissemination. Let the painter paint and if they need to get media support, let them work with a media expert. Having a painter make a website might be fine if that’s what they’re interested in, but new technology has the implication of democracy that’s a myth. It is a new form. We can use it for a lot of things, but if we want great artists we need to recognize that the media artists of today are the renaissance masters of the information age. They are not tech people there to help you with your printer or your social media profile: They are Michaelangelos. So, in arts infrastructure work, creating a tech/media support system for our artists would give artists more time to do their work so they can be the most effective. It doesn’t take any less time to be a great artist, so we have to be careful about imposing on our artists to become their own media experts.
Patrick’s Comments at the End of the Day
The conversations we had were rich. We were looking at media technology and the fact that someone who knows how to use current technology well is able to use it for political or cultural interests and those who don’t know the technology as well are not able to do so.
Our education system did not train us for this, so we need to avoid feeling guilty for not knowing how information age media work, but at the same time recognize the importance of gaining an understanding of the primary literacy of the day. We also had a discussion of time, and how things that proport to be creative ways to engage can actually take time from our real work. So, the artist who is trying to support their work by spreading the word through social media is spending a significant amount of time on things that are not their area of expertise, and less time on their practice.
We talked about how to be able to look at how we want to use our time given that many of these platforms are designed to keep you looking at them longer than you’d like if you had the ability to choose. We spoke about the ways technology is being used, and we used our sharing to start a conversation about how we’re going to follow up.
Patrick Finn
An active artist and academic, Dr. Patrick Finn studies performance: How it works, what constitutes excellence in performance, and what performance studies offer our daily lives.
He is an Associate Professor in the School of Creative and Performing Arts, and Computational Media Design at The University of Calgary, and Chair of Research and Innovation at The Edmonton Digital Arts College.
He works with companies, government and nonprofit organizations, artists, athletes, and anyone interested in bringing attention to the ways they do what they do. He unites his work using Aristotle’s phrase, “you are what you repeatedly do,” and brings focus to the approach by considering everything as technology. Technology, taken in the broad sense, involves what, and how, we do what we do. Thus, technology can be a physical gesture, the organization of a meeting, or the use of tools as part of our attempt to engage, connect, and flourish.
About the Creative Calgary Congress
Calgary Arts Development produced the first Arts Champions Congress in 2011 as a meeting place for people who make Calgary’s arts sector a vibrant and exciting place to work and our city a great place to live.
Renamed the Creative Calgary Congress in 2014, it returned on November 22, 2016 as a place to share ideas and explore ways that the arts and artists can play a leadership role in making Calgary a more curious, compassionate and creative place for all citizens.
