Peak Art Continued: The Effect of the Internet and The Power of Limitation

Does the Internet already contain every idea anyone has ever had? If we have ideas, should we even bother to pursue them? How can we be inventive when nothing can be new?

Economic and social conditions as well as technological advances have always been major forces in shaping artistic behavior. We might have never thought of creative ideas as being a finite resource, but like the dwindling supply of easily accessible oil, accessible or viable ideas are more difficult to refine from the crude ideas. They've been used up or partially used and discarded. Certainly many great ideas for inventions, processes, businesses, songs, artwork have been relegated to the wasteheaps of history, or simply recycled into various other art forms.

Perhaps the Internet has made it too easy to be creative, and less relevant as a result. Once a resource is abundant, we tend to use more of it, sometimes to the point of depletion. (Jevons Paradox).

Jevons Paradox is the theory that the efficiency with which a resource is used, tends to increase the rate of consumption. As we had with cheap oil, we have cheap bandwidth (for now). If net neutrality is not realized, bandwidth will come at a premium. It will slow the pace of the amount of content coming online, but may ultimately increase the profitability for those that survive.

For a filmmaker that relies on bandwidth, this constraint will affect the art form itself, or the visibility or marketability of the work. Perhaps the solution (albeit a counter-intuitive one) is to make bandwidth more expensive, which may have the effect of making the industry more profitable for established independent filmmakers, and less accessible to the public at large. In any case, an equilibrium will have to be reached between user-generated content (which has often proven to be more popular) and the industry standard. Anything cheap and plentiful will always trump the standard.

The Internet is probably overdue for constraints. Lately many writers have been ruminating about the insidious effect the Internet is having on us. The effect in fact may be real, as no boundaries or limitations have ever been imposed on it beyond what China, and perhaps a few other countries have done. Such boundaries or lack thereof shape the content within it, and what might be possible. Whatever form the Internet takes in the future will affect creative output accordingly.

Boundary Conditions

Recently I received an email from a friend that said he had gotten a new job painting state boundary lines so that they could be seen from space. (A great brush-ready stimulus project right?) Of course this was a joke, but I must admit having to do a double-take. This is an interesting thought experiment, I thought. We are hard wired to make boundaries or at least espouse their intrinsic meaning.

If artists had constraints imposed upon their work, how would they react?

Constraints are supposed to right the wrongs of creative profligacy, but are in fact bad as they say no to everything.

When I studied music composition, we were not allowed to use dots or ties in our compositions. Needless to say, everyone hated these rules, and few could write anything worth listening to--clunky, stiff, starving for syncopation. I later realized that it was a stricture to instill the idea of limitation.

Music is full of limits at many levels, such as the the ability of the players, room acoustics, economic, philosophical, psychological etc. In many ways, limitations can be somewhat disappointing, but an excellent workout for imagination.

Legos and Instruments

I loved Legos as child. In fact, I'd still love to work with them as they are a prime example of limitation. They are generative in the sense that the individual pieces generate variety. But over the years the various Lego sets that were designed to make one thing spoiled the essence of Legos. It now controls creativity by showing you what you have to make from the individual pieces, not what you can imagine them to be. It is essentially a limitation on a limitation, and perhaps a nice constraint, but I wonder how many kids break the rules and eventually make buildings or other objects out of the various sets.

But if Google gobbled Lego and made it truly open-source and bottom-up people would make their own bricks of different sizes. Creative? perhaps, but it would be a beautiful Kluge at best.

Musical instruments typically do one thing, and are also generative, making many things from simple elements. If they do multiple things it is at the invention of the musician (e.g. Jimi Hendrix). Early keyboard instruments made only three sounds independently, depending on the instrument: a piano, and organ or a harpsichord. Now anything can be assigned to a key or other controller, including smartphones and tablet computers. Who or what will set the limitation if it is not supplied?

Musical instrument manufacturers certainly haven't set limits.  The amount of stuff they pack into a device is stupefying. A Korg Triton synthesizer that I purchased in 2005 has an annoying array of useless dated sounds. One day I went through them, found all the sounds I liked and made a list of the best, wishing I could delete all the other stuff and get a credit from Korg for the ones I'll never use. Like the Lego sets, they drive the user to make prefab art, which ultimately treats the musician like they have no talent or imagination, or simply do not want to expend the energy.

Talent is a term of art

Musical talent has endured as a virtue simply because the musician has overcome severe constraints and made something with so few options. It is only within the last 30-40 years that options have multiplied for musical instruments, beginning with effects for electric guitars in the 1960s and 1970s and synthesizers in the 1980s. They were essentially a type of 'appliance' for musicians that made music easier, similar to a washing machine or a dish washer. The people that engineer and design synths must still be using this work-saving approach to making music, but at the expense talent and ingenuity. Pop music is sometimes all about the sound or timbre itself and not the musicianship, and gives the impression of being easy, which it sometimes is. But that can't be the case when trying to dig your way through menus and sub-menus of options.


Like the household appliances that made chores easier, Les Paul made guitar playing look effortless. Mary's voice was magically transformed into a strata of overdubs making talent look like something anyone could have without being born with some of it.  

In retrospect, these technologies increased the number of possibilities at the time, but ironically are now used as a constraint to make something sound like it was made with old technology.

See Emily Play

Art made by machines or computers is not new, but has progressively become more advanced. Emily has been practicing.

Emily Howell is the a music composition program written by David Cope, Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. (Emily is an acronym for the related program Emmy (Experiments in Musical Intelligence, or EMI). The music is created from random phrases in a database, its primary building blocks. It is surprisingly beautiful, and has none of the robotic characteristics of typical computer-generated music.



Emily is largely at the mercy of her programmers who set constraints as a kind of musical ventriloquism, controlling her thoughts and actions. This is certainly an interesting way to control the parameters from which she creates by setting preferences (as in software): loves Baroque music, hates Romantic, bad at Chopin, all of which may affect the music she makes. She may ultimately create 'interesting' or 'beautiful' music, but it does not emanate from her own understanding of what is interesting or beautiful, but rather our collective sense of it. Only when Emily fully understands the importance of beauty, will her preferences shape the music, and perhaps ignore the constraints or contexts (something she will also have to understand). Ultimately making art is equal part limitation and surrender, which I doubt any system can pull off on its own without deliberate intervention from humans. In any event, we will continue to watch Emily play.

Art made from systems or processes is a way of examining what humans may be doing when creating something: selecting, gathering, removing, reshaping, revising, etc. Emily is natively digital in the sense that she works from a range that is not a smooth series, but driven by the granularity of her data set. As far as having a machine be human-like, we would need millions of options to account for all the different ways she may feel, the size of her hands, the level of her musicianship. Ultimately, making music in this fashion could be a very interesting way to simulate music at the macro level, from which the final work is derived. It is entirely possible that Emily may become a better musician than most of us once she can fully understand the many shades of beauty and ugliness. Or perhaps she should only understand what we give her, and be the perfect robot.

Apps

Virtual acoustic instruments on smartphones are in their infancy so it is too early to tell whether they will be used at the same level as other musical instruments, or will follow the same historical path as other technologies. In any event, they will always have limitations that will dictate what kind of art they make. The creativity will be reliant on the imagination of artists, abiding by the rules, making new ones, or breaking them altogether.

Apple has been right-headed to bake-in some constraints in their hardware, which consequently sets constraints in the software, and naturally stovepipes creativity. Some people take it to the next level and jailbreak the devices to release the limitations. If Apple is smart, they may want to incorporate what frequently gets broken into. Knowing that users will hack it, Apple can initially lock it down and then let users crowdsource the software updates.


Mobile devices are great for steering content based on the limitations of size. The various photo apps typically constrain the results by giving the user a finite set of options, such as the Sepia Camera. The cheap plastic Holga camera made in China that is 'broken' by design, drives creativity by allowing the user to exploit its flaws.

Here is a photograph taken with a similar camera in the mid 1940s that has light leak, but in this case the artifact is not intentional--it is the state of the technology as it was in the 1940s for a consumer-level camera. It is a very small print (which incidentally is another constraint whereby the historical value is driven by the constraints imposed when the print was made.) With digital tools we can enlarge this exponentially, but the actual print is small.

The Media Are The Message

Every era has its own duration constraint. In the 60s it was the 45, 2:30 to 3:30 minutes long with an intro that a DJ could talk over. 12" vinyl gave us 45 minutes to an hour on 2 sides. CDs gave us 74 minutes, all of which affected the content and ways of working. Perhaps one of the reasons vinyl has seen a resurgence is that it has a built-in constraint of size, and like the Holga, has charming flaws.

Theoretically there are now no constraints on duration relative to the medium, except file sizes. It would be difficult to impose a universal standard based on a constraint of 20MB for example, but is an interesting thought. On YouTube the constraint is 10 minutes or 2GB, which ever comes first. So far it hasn't had an effect on the content.

Constraints and Ways of Working

When we set out to create something, things will drift as you attempt to shape the content in accordance with your initial vision. It is easy to surrender and let it take you where it wants to go. But that is not a constraint per se.

The recycling of ideas and content is a constraint as it has the built-in limitation inherent in the selected elements, or in the paucity of material. Without application of restraint a collage may look like this:

This was made in Picasa, Google's free photo software in 15 seconds. There may have been some good photos in that collection but you can't see them. Visual noise may fatigue our sense of what is truly unique or useful, even if it is clearly visible otherwise. I can surrender and select images without thinking about them, or select all of the images in a folder and see what happens.

Blaming the Internet

As the Internet becomes a more integral part of what artists do, the more critical it will become to consider its role in the creative process. Not only do more software tools exist in the cloud, but the social aspects of the Internet may also affect the choices we make. Social capital will equal creative capital, regardless of the merit of the actual work. The age of 'Like' will dominate the epoch, for better or for worse.

The lack of constraints may also lead to 'bubblification', as it did in the financial meltdown. In hindsight the cause still seems intractable, and why we didn't see it coming. But as I demonstrated in the Picasa collage sometimes all we see is an amorphous noise cloud that doesn't show anything we might need to see. We need outlines, edges, and frames for thinking and doing.

Constraints ultimately define the medium, and its historical path. Limitations are good, but the key is to know when and how to use them, or how to react to them.