What’s love got to do with technology? And other 2023 learnings
Each creative activity—a work of art, an event, anything that we arrange for other people to discover—begins with a promise. The promise of technology is about creating a connection with another being
Before we get to the importance of promise in our relationship to art, technology, — and to each other, here are some of the things I’ve learned this year:
That young people prefer mushrooms to VR headsets. In a series of articles about the future of art in the Beaux Arts Magazine (‘L’Art en 2063’), one immediately notices that all the op-eds by theorists and curators aged 40+ revolve around AI and technology. On the other hand, statements by artists under 20 focus on natural materials (mycelium), ancestral knowledge, reusing existing resources, and collaborative work with local artists and communities. Not a single 20-year-old mentions machine learning or digital technology, and none discusses a globalized take on a digitally enhanced cultural 'experience.' Established markets and mainstream institutions are considered hypocritical and toxic. I observed a similar trend in the way my nephews (23 and 16 y. o.) and their friends approach their reality and potential futures, but I wasn't aware that it is an actual trend among an entire generation of creatives. None of what is currently happening at the so-called cross-section of art and technology takes this into consideration in countless agency foresights and industry reports on the future of everything. Perhaps our perspective on where the future of arts and culture lies requires a revision.
That digital experiences should be scarce. I'm not surprised that, contrary to what many middle aged 'evangelists' and futurists may wish for, some people simply don't want to live in a world where they would make a U-turn on a busy highway after realizing they've left their VR/AR headset at home (as per a LinkedIn post I read the other day):
Here's on the topic:
“As our society gets more efficient and tech savvy, we tend to not notice the benefits of community and non-scalable experiences until we lose them. Whether it is the Vegas Sphere or other emerging hyper-realistic experiences like Apple’s Virtual Pro, we should get better at identifying the human components of that make experiences feel special. Hearing people laugh makes us laugh. Seeing people around us light up with amazement helps us appreciate the moment and feel amazed. Singing out loud with friends that know the words builds a sense of connection. And knowing that we’re sharing a scarce and sacred experience with others helps us value the experience more. Whether you’re building a brand, a performance, or a digital experience, you need to consider these human elements as equally important design considerations. Much like early video games started solo but thrived when extended to a community of players, I anticipate that virtual and immersive sport and entertainment experiences will only thrive if they become shared, communal, and potentially scarce experiences. (...) We can also make digital experiences rare and thus more appreciated. Perhaps court-side seats for an NBA game on the Vision Pro should be limited? Perhaps digital art should be published in limited supply much like the physical world?”
That ‘Technology is always about love’. I declared this fierce statement during a late-night conversation with a friend from the past who shaped a significant portion of my thoughts on the relationship between art and politics. Sitting in a nineteenth-century tavern over moules–frites, we tried to find common ground in how, working in different environments (theatre <> technology) and after ten years of not seeing each other—ten years during which the world we live in has changed drastically—we understand the surrounding reality and our respective roles in it as people who try to shape modern culture. How do you explain the essence of your work to someone you care about, who lacks knowledge in your field, and who seeks genuine understanding of what you discuss?
Here's a note to remember this conversation — and to wrap up 2023.
What’s love got to do with it
Like almost everything, it starts with a promise. Each creative activity—a work of art, an event, anything that we arrange for other people to discover—begins with a promise ('We are all promises we can’t keep,' – Rilke). The promise of technology, XR in particular, is about creating a connection with another being. The stakes are high when you consider how lonely we’ve become over the past decades and how a draining sense of solitude is present in many people’s daily struggle. We may speculate on why loneliness, alongside depression, appears to be a significant social challenge in the contemporary world. However, we certainly recognize the widespread impact it can have on the lives of both vulnerable individuals and entire communities. This realization is ironic and grim, especially in the context of a hyperconnected culture that promotes everyday sharing, giving, and receiving feedback, yet incubates behaviors of self-censorship, self-punishment, guilt, and a sense of disconnection. As in almost everything related to technology there is already a name for it — extended loneliness:
“It is extended because it is constituted by the hyperconnectivity of cyberworlds, where technological devices such as smartphones, laptops, and digital assistants as well as platforms, online games, and social media, can be vehicles of loneliness. They become vehicles of loneliness when hyperconnectivity takes the shape of a lifestyle and technological devices are pervasive in the user’s living space.”
Mirror, mirror
We often assume that technology is a set of tools that are supposed to make things easier for us; tools that are a simple extension of our hands, a subwoofer for our so-called creativity. But that kind of utilitarian approach a) is not true; b) removes access to a vast and fertile layer of soil that the urge for innovation is rooted in. Every technological invention is a unit that carries an invisible army of suppressed or unrealized social expectations. Similarly to how Lem in ‘Solaris’ defined reasons why people are attracted by the unknown – 'We don’t need other worlds, we need mirrors', – we could ask if setting a reflection to humanity isn’t what drives many people’s passion for AI development.
The promise of AI is, as we know, to become the ultimate mirror to mankind. Thinkers and artists recognize that behind every conversation with a machine that can pass the Turing Test lies an ancient need to reach out to a potent being, sentient or not, who can provide answers to questions about who we are and what our purpose is. The ultimate goal of this illusionary exchange is to seek support in the darkest moments of our lives, when we are facing the ultimate loneliness of losing what we love. This is the real, often unconscious motivation behind the millions of prompts that users across the world type into GPT every day, hoping to hear an answer that will surpass their expectations or bring them consolation that no human being can offer.
Long before Mary Shelley’s opus saw daylight, the dream of bringing to life a godlike man-made creature, an oracle who is, at once, superior to us and was made to serve ('Non serviam' as the actual singularity moment), propelled myths and desires of those who looked beyond limitations imposed by our mortality. Mortality and love are close companions; they can’t keep long without one another. And every true inventor is, to some extent, a descendant of Victor Frankenstein.
“VR is a technology that exposes you to yourself” — Jaron Lanier.
Most spatial projects promise a transformative experience whose key ingredients are presence and connection ('We are all promises we can’t keep'). That is why an important difference between what we define as Immersive and, let’s say, film or photography, lies in the fact that spatial experiences induce an immediate and continuous sense of companionship. The companion whose presence you’re feeling from the moment you dive into an XR story is not the narrator (or the wicked VR voice-over—what a careless take on the voice of God). I dare to say that the companion keeping you company, whose presence you feel through the device you carry, with the hope that the suspension of disbelief will anesthetize you and allow you to wander in a space where discoveries and people await you, is, in fact, yourself.
'Things will be great when you're downtown / No finer place for sure, downtown / Everything's waiting for you.' Petula Clark meets Solaris. If the pursuit of overcoming loneliness initiated the labyrinth, what awaits at the end is an encounter with oneself. Celine Daeman, a young VR director who recently won one of the Immersive awards in Venice, has understood this better than anyone making it a design principle of her excellent free-roaming experience ‘Songs For a Passerby’ where the user chases their own shadow only to ultimately confront themselves in the mirror. VR is a technology that exposes you to yourself.
In a world that was made just for you, spaces would react to your presence, providing triggers that eventually reveal who you are by activating streams of memories, dreams, and forgotten ideas. As we sit here, in this steadily growing digital nest knitted from our shared realities, each of us remembers at least one moment in VR/AR where we experienced this feeling. We also recognize how different this sensation is from other emotional moments in screening rooms, theaters, or opera houses. Immersive experiences go beyond emotional disturbance through observation; instead, they involve internalizing occurrences that feel tailor-made for us—because XR is always about us. This unique personal connection with a world that responds to us and seeks our attention reminds us of the feeling of being loved, the only remedy to fear, mortality, and pain. A moment of connection, a substitute for love, and a cure for loneliness — this is what makes the promise of immersive technology.
(It's surprising how the same promise can be fulfilled on different scales and proportions, whether in a lavish LBE, a VR headset, or even on your phone. For instance, while watching a Gorillaz AR music video, the sense of connection ignites the moment when Murdoch floats through Times Square, and his age-defying band suddenly appears on your bedroom rug. This is possible because our imagination engages with spatial experiences orders of magnitude faster than with any 2D object, much like how the brain memorizes information better when trained with an old mnemotechnique called 'the memory palace.' Try 'attaching' your holiday shopping list to rooms and objects in your house, and you'll remember it without having to add a single note to your iPhone).
All We Have Is Words, All We Have Is Worlds
We need this kind of debate to understand what it is that we’re building – and why. For what it’s worth, it can help predict or at least draft scenarios for the future. By slipping beneath the utilitarian surface of technology, which is an inherently philosophical domain expressing itself through 2D and 3D design, we won’t get far. We should prioritize the social value of technology over ROI. We should learn and practice how to actually define value; expect care, reconciliation, and mutual support to become foundational principles of all activity undertaken in the tech world. We should prioritize excellence because quality always leads to greater results in the long-term perspective. And we should not forget in every decision we make that human life is about creating good memories. When the time comes to evaluate what we’ve done, it won't be the wealth accumulated for those who paid us to make them richer that will matter. I haven’t yet seen many tombstones celebrating successful spreadsheet owners.
Resilience, which we hear so much about in 2023/24 business reports and trends books, is about bracing for the storm and carrying on through hardship. But resilience and hardship mean something else for each and every one of us, and it should start with protecting what mission-driven professionals have been building for years to make sense of technology as a sentient oracle – not an enslaved creature. Although we operate in different contexts, with different needs and obligations, we’ll always share the question of how we want to live and what kind of legacy we want to leave behind, which, by the way, is another thing technology is essentially about.
We also need a language and a history to safeguard our own legacy. A discipline with no memory can have no language of its own. Without language, there is no way to communicate the mission. And without a continuous effort to expand and grow, any mission needs to surrender to entropy and, eventually, come to an inevitable end. After almost twenty years of creative experimentation, and community and industry building efforts, what we know as the immersive art and storytelling movement has come to a point where it must either transform into a sequence of thriving standalone organisms or quietly die away, proving to be an evolutionary dead end.
As a community, we profoundly feel the pressure of standing at the crossroads, almost like a forest of trees communicating subconsciously about an upcoming change. Some see it as a threat; others see it as an opportunity. I see it as a moment when, as we brace for the unknown, often seeking a new ethical bedrock of what we do, we need to secure the legacy of what the first generation of XR makers believed in and what we can learn from them, looking at this collective effort from an art history perspective. Only this lens can offer an overview of what was achieved, and what wasn’t, of the right scale and historical importance.
Regardless of which scenario will prevail, without writing down the existing short history of the immersive art movement, a place in between disciplines, a laboratory for future thinkers, nothing that we discovered or learned will be transmitted to the next wave of creators and historians. Quite like theater, where I was born and raised, immersive has only a spoken history of anecdotes and personal stories that live only as long as we carry them and repeat them in the closed circle of those who remember. This is a dangerously romanticized perspective that can lead to the disappearance of an entire period in the history of modern media and contemporary art.
Light – Ohr
This year ends for me with an anecdote. A couple days ago my mother, a fearless 77 year old Polish immigrant who recently started to inquire about her family heritage, asked me if we could light our first hanukkiah together. We never celebrated Hanukkah and we haven’t had a Hanukkiah at home, so I made a DIY Hanukkah menorah from single candle holders and two sushi plates (I apologize for this unorthodox approach; there aren’t many Jewish candelabras at my local E.Leclerc).
As mom read about the Hanukkah miracle, she suddenly put down her phone, looked at the candles, and said without hesitation: 'This story means that people can take much more than they think they are capable of.' I felt light filling the room when she was saying her words of wisdom and thought—this moment is all that matters.