Posts Tagged ‘art’
“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.”*…
Most historians of science fiction begin their stories with the likes of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, and lean on the extraordinary impact of Hugo Gernsback. Art and culture historian Fleur Hopkins-Loféron reminds us that there was an early 20th-century movement in France that prefigured much of what we now celebrate in speculative fiction…
When Nicolas Vermont entered the greenhouse, he would make a gruesome discovery. It was the early 20th century in rural France, and Nicolas was visiting his uncle – a scientist and surgeon called Dr Frédéric Lerne – after 15 years apart. However, he had soon grown suspicious about his uncle’s odd behaviour, so for answers had decided to explore the grounds of his relative’s estate late at night.
Inside a greenhouse in the garden, Nicolas discovered that Dr Lerne had been conducting disturbing scientific experiments. At first, he saw plants grafted onto one another: a cactus growing a geranium flower, and an oak tree sprouting cherries and walnuts. His uneasy curiosity, though, soon turned to dread. ‘It was then that I touched the hairy plant. Having felt the two treated leaves, so like ears, I felt them warm and quivering,’ he recalled. Grafted onto the stem were the parts of an animal: the ears of a dead rabbit. ‘My hand, clenched with repugnance, shook off the memory of the contact as it would have shaken off some hideous spider.’ [Quotations from published English-language editions translated by Brian Stapleford; the rest are the author’s own.]
Dr Lerne was in fact an impostor. His assistant Otto Klotz had stolen the true uncle’s body through a brain swap, and would not hesitate to punish Nicolas for his ill-placed curiosity… by transplanting his consciousness into the body of a bull.
Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (1908), or ‘Dr Lerne, Demi-God’, was a celebrated novel by Maurice Renard, hailed by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire as a ‘subdivine novel of metamorphoses’.Published in English as New Bodies for Old, it heralded the dawn of a new French literary genre – one that ventured boldly into the uncertain and the unknown. Renard called it ‘merveilleux-scientifique’ (‘scientific-marvellous’) and its ambition was to help the reader speculate on what could be, and on what exists beyond the reach of our senses, rather than what will be. In other words, allowing a better understanding of what Renard poetically called ‘the imminent threats of the possible’. As he wrote in 1914, the goal was to ‘patrol the margins of certainty, not to acquire knowledge of the future, but to gain a greater understanding of the present’.
Rejecting the ‘scientific adventure’ storytelling of the celebrated French sci-fi writer Jules Verne – who had died only three years before the publication of Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu – the merveilleux-scientifique genre was grounded in plausibility and the scientific method. According to Renard, only one physical, chemical or biological law may be altered when telling a story. This strict discipline, he argued, is what lent the genre its power to sharpen the reader’s mind, by offering a wholly original kind of thought experiment. For example, Renard modelled Dr Lerne on the very real surgeon and biologist Alexis Carrel, who had experimented with surgical grafts, transplants and animal tissues… to the point that he even grafted a dog’s severed head on another living animal (the attempt failed). Following in his footsteps, Renard imagines an exchange of brains – and personalities.
Leafing through the merveilleux-scientifique novels today allows for a dual rediscovery: firstly, it uncovers the previously unrecognised richness of Belle Époque scientific fiction, which did not perish with the works of Verne. The stories take in journeys to Mars, solar cataclysms, reading of auras, psychic control, weighing of souls, death rays, alien invasions, even strolls among the infinitesimally small. But exploring the genre also offers insights into the cultural history of the era, marked by a significant permeability between science and pseudo-science. Reading this work, we can learn a lot about the aspirations, fears and beliefs of early 20th-century Europe.
Perhaps more importantly, the lesser-known stories of merveilleux-scientifique allow us to question the official history of science fiction – a term that did not even exist in France at the time as it as it would be popularised in English by Hugo Gernsback only in the 1920s. Whereas today it is sci-fi writers like Jules Verne or H G Wells who are most remembered from this period, the merveilleux-scientifique novels were just as imaginative and visionary, but often far more provocative, daring and strange…
Much more– with wonderful reproductions of the works’ covers: “Merveilleux-scientifique” from @aeon.co.
* J. G. Ballard (in a 1971 essay, “Fictions Of Every Kind“)
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As we speculate, we might recall that it was on this date in 1850 that the first U.S. patent for magic lantern slides made of glass plate was issued to their inventor Frederick Langenheim of Philadelphia, Pa. (No. 7,784) as an “improvement in photographic pictures on glass.” Magic lantern shows were largely informational, but (especially in Europe in the 19th century) magic lanterns were used to stage “Phantasmagoria,” a form of horror theater that (among other techniques) used one or more magic lanterns to project frightening images – such as skeletons, demons, and ghosts – typically using rear projection onto a semi-transparent screen to keep the lantern out of sight.
“That’s the artist’s job, really: continually setting yourself free, and giving yourself new options and new ways of thinking about things”*…
Further, in a fashion, to last week’s post on literacy (and post-literacy), Nathan Gardels alerts us to a conversation between Ken Liu and Nils Gilman, in which Liu suggests that, in a way analogous to the the camera’s ability to capture motion (and thus, transform storytelling), AI is emerging as a new artistic medium for capturing subjective experience…
For the celebrated novelist Ken Liu, whose works include “The Paper Menagerie” and Chinese-to-English translation of “The Three-Body Problem,” science fiction is a way to plumb the anxieties, hopes and abiding myths of the collective unconscious.
In this pursuit, he argues in a Futurology podcast, AI should not be regarded as a threat to the distinctive human capacity to organize our reality or imagine alternative worlds through storytelling. On the contrary, the technology should be seen as an entirely new way to access that elusive realm beneath the surface and deepen our self-knowledge.
As a window into the interiority of others, and indeed, of ourselves, Liu believes the communal mirror of Large Language Models opens the horizons of how we experience and situate our presence in the world.
“It’s fascinating to me to think about AI as a potential new artistic medium in the same way that the camera was a new artistic medium,” he muses. What the roving aperture enabled was the cinematic art form of capturing motion, “so you can splice movement around … and can break all kinds of rules about narrative art that used to be true.
“In the dramatic arts, it was just assumed that because you had to perform in front of an audience on the stage, that you had to follow certain unities to make your story comprehensible. The unity of action, of place, of time. You can’t just randomly jump around, or the audience wouldn’t be able to follow you.
But with this motion-capturing machine, you can in fact do that. That’s why an actual movie is very different from a play.
You can do the reaction shots, you can do the montages, you can do the cuts, you can do the swipes, you can do all sorts of things in the language of cinema.
You can put audiences in perspectives that they normally can never be in. So it’s such a transformation of the understanding of presence, of how a subject can be present in a dramatic narrative story.”
He continues: “Rather than thinking about AI as a cheap way to replace filmmakers, to replace writers, to replace artists, think of [it] as a new kind of machine that captures something and plays back something. What is the thing that it captures and plays back? The content of thought, or subjectivity.”
The ancient Greeks called the content, or object of a person’s thought, “noema,” which is why this publication bears that name.
Liu thus invents the term “Noematograph” as analogous to “the cinematograph not for motion, but for thought … AI is really a subjectivity capturing machine, because by being trained on the products of human thinking, it has captured the subjectivities, the consciousnesses, that were involved in the creation of those things.”
Liu sees value in what some regard as the worst qualities of generative AI.
“This is a machine that allows people to play with subjectivities and to craft their own fictions, to engage in their own narrative self-construction in the process of working with an AI,” he observes. “The fact that AI is sycophantic and shapeable by you is the point. It’s not another human being. It’s a simulation. It’s a construction. It’s a fictional thing.
You can ask the AI to explain, to interpret. You can role-play with AI. You can explore a world that you construct together.
You can also share these things with other humans. One of the great, fun trends on the internet involving using AI, in fact, is about people crafting their own versions of prompts with models and then sharing the results with other humans.
And then a large group, a large community, comes together to collaboratively play with AI. So I think it’s the playfulness, it’s that interactivity, that I think is going to be really, really determinative of the future of AI as an art form.”
So, what will the product of this new art form look like?
“As a medium for art, what will come out of it won’t look anything like movies or novels …They’re going to be much more like conversations with friends. They’re going to be more like a meal you share with people. They are much more ephemeral in the moment. They’re about the participation. They’re about the consumer being also the creator.
They’re much more personalized. They’re about you looking into the strange mirror and sort of examining your own subjectivity.”
Much of what Liu posits echoes the views of the philosopher of technology, Tobias Rees, in a previous conversation with Noema.
As Rees describes it, “AI has much more information available than we do, and it can access and work through this information faster than we can. It also can discover logical structures in data — patterns — where we see nothing.
AI can literally give us access to spaces that we, on our own, qua human, cannot discover and cannot access.”
He goes on: “Imagine an AI model … that has access to all your data. Your emails, your messages, your documents, your voice memos, your photos, your songs, etc.
Such an AI system can make me visible to myself … it literally can lift me above me. It can show me myself from outside of myself, show me the patterns of thoughts and behaviors that have come to define me. It can help me understand these patterns, and it can discuss with me whether they are constraining me, and if so, then how. What is more, it can help me work on those patterns and, where appropriate, enable me to break from them and be set free.”
Philosophically put, says Rees, invoking the meaning of “noema” as Liu does, “AI can help me transform myself into an ‘object of thought’ to which I can relate and on which I can work.
“The work of the self on the self has formed the core of what Greek philosophers called meletē and Roman philosophers meditatio. And the kind of AI system I evoke here would be a philosopher’s dream. It could make us humans visible to ourselves from outside of us.”
Liu’s insight as a writer of science fiction realism is to see what Rees describes in the social context of interactive connectivity.
The arrival of new technologies is always disruptive to familiar ways of seeing that were cultivated from within established capacities. Letting go of those comforting narratives that guide our inner world is existentially disorienting. It is here that art’s vocation comes into play as the medium that helps move the human condition along. To see technology as an art form, as Liu does, is to capture the epochal moment of transformation that we are presently living through…
Is AI birthing a new art form? “From Cinema To The Noematograph,” @kyliu99.bsky.social and @nilsgilman.bsky.social in @futurologypod.bsky.social.
See/her the full conversation:
See also: “O brave new world, that has such people in ‘t!“
* Miranda July
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As we observe, with William Gibson, that the street finds its own uses for things, we might recall that it was on this date in 1959 that perhaps the pinnacle of cinema’s ability to capture motion was released: the most famous the the six films of Ben Hur, “the Charlton Heston version.”
At the time, Ben Hur had the largest budget ($15.175 million), the largest sets, a wardrobe staff of 100, over 200 artists, about 200 camels and 2,500 horses and about 10,000 extras.
Filming began on May 18, 1958, and didn’t wrap up until January 7, 1959. The film crew worked between 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week.
The chariot race scene lasts for nine minutes in the finished film and Miklos Rozsa’s film score is the longest ever composed for a film.
– source
“Seeing comes before words”*…
Five years ago, (R)D featured John Berger’s award-winning– and more to the point, hugely-influential– television series Ways of Seeing (in some ways a response to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation series). The broadcast was followed by an adaptation of Berger’s scripts that became a book of the same name.
Now that hugely influential work is available in a gorgeous web version…
Based on the 1972 BBC series and comprised of 7 essays, 3 of which are entirely pictoral, Ways of Seeing is a seminal work which examines how we view art…
A beautiful new way to enjoy (and learn from) a classic: “Ways of Seeing“
* John Berger (the first line of Ways of Seeing)
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As we ponder perspective, we might pause to celebrate the induction, on this date in 2005, into the the National Toy Hall of Fame of a plaything that invites constant creativity– the cardboard box.
“I don’t consider it my violin. Rather, I’m its violinist. I am passing through its life.”*…
Jennifer Sandlin is (perfectly understandably) blown away by cellist-turned-photographer Charles Brooks’ images of the interiors of rare musical instruments…
… Each instrument appears as if it’s straight out of a dream — some look like futuristic structures, some like fantasy castles, and others like secret lairs of fantastical creatures. It’s hard to believe they’re real, and I’m just in awe of Brooks’ photography talent.
The photographs are part of Brooks’ “Architecture in Music” series, where, he explains, he “explore[s] the hidden spaces inside fine instruments” which have included a Steinway Grand Piano, the St. Mark’s Pipe Organ, and the Lockey Hill Cello (c. 1780, England), among many others…
Read on for more of the story: “Photographer captures the stunning interiors of rare musical instruments,” from @boingboing.net. See more of Brooks’ remarkable photos on his site. And hear him tell his story here:
* Ivry Gitlis (speaking of his 1713 Stradivarius violin)
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As we cherish craftsmanship, those among us with a preference for reeds might note that today is Saxophone Day– a commemoration of the birth (on this date in 1814) of Adolphe Sax, a musician and inventor who created several new musical instruments (e.g., a redesigned bass clarinet still in use today), most notably the one that bears his name– the saxophone…
… while the brassier might celebrate the birthday (in 1854) of John Philip Sousa. A composer and conductor known primarily for American military marches (e.g., “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” National March of the United States of America. and “Semper Fidelis,” official march of the United States Marine Corps) he is widely acknowledged in the U.S. as “The March King.”
The press of unusually-intensive meetings is going to prevent posting tomorrow, so (R)D will be away for a day, returning on Saturday…
“I think every age has a medium that talks to it more eloquently than the others. In the 19th century it was symphonic music and the novel. For various technical and artistic reasons, film became that eloquent medium for the 20th century.”*…
… and few filmmakers have been as fluent as the remarkable Walter Murch. In the context of a review of Murch’s recent book, Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design, John Lahr offers an appreciation…
Walter Murch , the film editor and sound designer Francis Ford Coppola has described as ‘kind of like the film world’s one intellectual’, has what he terms standfleisch. He has spent most of his almost sixty years in the film industry standing his lanky frame in front of various editing consoles. ‘Why do surgeons, orchestra conductors and cooks all stand to do their jobs?’ he asks in Suddenly Something Clicked, a piñata of ideas and anecdotes about his life and work. It sheds light on his forensic craft, his distinctive way of thinking about editing and the making of many of the major films he’s worked on, including Apocalypse Now (1979), the Godfather trilogy (1972-90), The Conversation (1974), American Graffiti (1973) and the 1998 recut of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil.
To Murch, who has won three Academy Awards and been nominated for six more, film editing is a sensual ‘full-body’ experience: ‘a kind of dance, a choreography of images and sounds in the flow of time, forged in movement, eventually crystallising into permanence’. This embrace is a kind of erotic surrender to the unique metabolism of each story and its performers, a way of ‘drenching yourself in the sensibility of the film to the point where you’re alive to the smallest details’. ‘To watch Murch at work,’ Michael Ondaatje writes in The Conversations (2002), ‘is to see him delve into almost invisible specifics, where he harnesses and moves the bones or arteries of a scene, relocating them so they will alter the look of the features above the skin.’ The Conversations, a book of interviews with Murch, grew out of his work on the film version of Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient. ‘Most of the work he does is going to affect us subliminally,’ Ondaatje writes. ‘There is no showing off here.’ In the filigree of image and sound there comes a moment when, Murch says, he disappears into the film: ‘The shots, the emotions, the story seem to take over. Sometimes – the best times – this process reaches the point where I can look at the scene and say, “I didn’t have anything to do with that – it just created itself.”’
How heavy is this editorial heavy-lifting? Murch, of course, has done the maths. In the tale of the tape, Apocalypse Now is the undisputed champ. A single frame of 35 mm film weighs ‘five-thousandths of an ounce’; a reel of film – eleven minutes of picture and sound – weighs eleven pounds, or a pound a minute. By that calculation, the 1,250,000 feet of film shot by Coppola weighed more than 14,000 pounds or, as Murch puts it, ‘seven tons of film that had to be broken down, boxed, catalogued, put in accessible racks, moved around from editor to editor’. The average ratio of footage shot to footage used in a feature film is 20:1; the ratio for Apocalypse Now was 95:1. Over four years, Murch and his team got the film down from 236 hours to 2 hours and 27 minutes. This is as much bushwhacking as editing, finding the film’s story as well as its grammar, a feat Murch also accomplished for Coppola in The Conversation, which he restructured and essentially rewrote by cutting a third of the scenes…
… If Murch is full of wonder at film’s storytelling possibilities, the inventors of the moving picture were not. ‘The cinema is an invention without a future,’ Louis Lumière declared. The cinematograph, which he invented with his brother, Auguste, was a camera that recorded, developed and projected film onto a screen (one of the first being a bedsheet in a Russian brothel). Thomas Edison, though more interested in sound than image, developed the Kinetograph (an early motion-picture camera) and the Kinetoscope, which projected images that could be seen through peepholes. The breakthrough, which turned a 19th-century novelty into the 20th century’s only new art form, was the arrival of montage in 1901. The transition from one shot to another transformed motion pictures from a literal medium into a psychological and poetic one. Movies could now jump back and forth in time and space, ‘the cinematic equivalent to the discovery of flight’, as Murch sees it. Out of its illusion of naturalistic flow – 24 frames a projected second – a new grammar of seeing and of storytelling evolved: close-ups, dissolves, long shots, fade-outs.
‘“Filmic” juxtapositions are taking place in the real world not only when we dream but also when we are awake,’ Murch wrote in his book from 1992, In the Blink of an Eye. This explains why audiences find edited film a surprisingly familiar experience. Every blink is a thought. Every thought is a cut. In support of this belief, Murch quotes John Huston: ‘Look at that lamp across the room. Now look back at me. Look back at that lamp. Now look back at me again. Do you see what you did? You blinked. Those are cuts. Your mind cut the scene. First you behold the lamp. Cut. Then you behold me.’ In cinema, Murch says, ‘at the moment you decide to cut, what you are saying is, in effect, “I am going to bring this idea to an end and start something new.”’…
… Murch jostles between metaphysics and neurology in his discussion of film editing, but biology is his link to theorising about sound design. Hearing develops four and a half months after conception. ‘We luxuriate in a continuous bath of sounds: the song of our mother’s voice, the swash of her breathing, the piping of her intestines, the timpani of her heart,’ he writes. ‘The almost industrial intensity of this womb sound’ is about 75 decibels, ‘equivalent to … the cabin of a cruising passenger jet’. After birth, however, sound is gradually demoted. ‘Whatever virtues sound brings to film are largely perceived and appreciated by the audience in visual terms. The better the sound, the better the image.’ This fusing of sound and image is a sleight of mind in which the brain projects dimensionality onto the screen and makes it seem as if it had come from the image in the first place. ‘We do not see and hear a film, we hear/see/hear/see it.’
By his own admission, the phenomenal success of The Godfather triggered a revival of the metaphorical use of layered sound. Murch’s masterstroke of sound design was the addition – not indicated in the original script – of a rising metallic screech, as if from an overhead train, as Michael Corleone prepares to assassinate Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey. ‘The rumbling and piercing metallic scream,’ he writes, ‘is not linked directly to anything seen on screen, and so the audience is made to wonder at least momentarily, if perhaps only subconsciously, “What is this?”’ Because it is detached from the image, the scream becomes a clue to Michael’s state of mind; it comes and goes, then grows louder and louder until he finally pulls out his gun. After he shoots, the sound stops abruptly.
‘Even for the most well-prepared of directors, there are limits to the imagination and memory,’ Murch writes. ‘It is the editor’s job to propose alternative scenarios as bait.’ In Apocalypse Now, the sampan massacre and, more important, the restoration of Captain Willard’s narration to the final script are down to Murch. ‘Willard is an observer – he is our eyes and ears in this diabolical landscape – and for most of the journey, until he gets to the Kurtz compound, he is a mostly silent passenger,’ Murch explains. ‘The audience judges character by comparing words spoken with actions taken, but if there are few words and fewer actions, the character has to emerge from somewhere else: out of an interior, quasi-novelistic voice.’ Following this editorial impulse, Murch dug out Willard’s voiceover from the original screenplay and recorded it himself, ‘lacing it selectively over the first half-hour of film’. His pitch worked. Willard’s voiceover was reinstated (as rewritten by Michael Herr), a crucial adjustment that spoke to the accuracy of Coppola’s dictum that a film director is the ‘ringmaster of a circus that’s inventing itself’.
Suddenly Something Clicked was conceived by Murch as a ‘three-braided rope – theory, practice and history’, a sort of intellectual high-wire act of technical expertise and personal anecdote. Like Murch himself, the book is unique. It’s designed for the reader to play with. Want to read Maxim Gorky’s reaction to seeing his first motion picture? Or see Orson Welles’s lost 58-page memo to the Universal Studios executives who took control of his production of Touch of Evil? Or hear the six pre-mixes and the final mix of the helicopters landing to ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ in Apocalypse Now? Or watch an animated restructuring of the scenes in The Conversation? QR codes beside the text provide detours into these subjects and more. Similarly, there are chyrons of adages from other filmmakers and artists – ‘fortunes’, Murch calls them – at the bottom of every even-numbered page, intended as a kind of dialectical chorus to counterpoint or contradict his opinions. His high-spirited advice to film editors holds true for his readers: ‘Good luck! Make discoveries!’…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Every Blink,” from @lrb.co.uk.
As his book(s) on film and editing would suggest, Murch is generous in sharing his insights. That’s true too at a more personal level, as he’s made time to advise and mentor younger, less-experienced filmmakers (as your correspondent can attest).
Apropos Coppola’s characterization of him, Murch is a man of wide interests– to many of which, as reported in “Walter just knows stuff” (source of the image above) and “Transits, Translations, and Secret Patterns: When Lawrence Weschler Met Walter Murch,” he’s made important contributions. Oh, and he’s also a literary translator.
* Walter Murch
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As we juxtapose, we might spare athought for an earlier cinematic pioneer, Hal Roach; he died on this date in 1992. A film and television producer, director and screenwriter, and founder of the namesake Hal Roach Studios, he was active in the industry from the 1910s to the 1990s. He is best known for producing a number of early media franchise successes, including the Laurel and Hardy franchise, Harold Lloyd‘s early films, the films of entertainer Charley Chase, and the Our Gang (AKA, “The Little Rascals”) short film comedy series.
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