Digital Creativity

Something from Nothing

G. Sporton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349695300, 9781137486400
• eBook ISBN: 9781137486417
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art général

Examining the role and impact of technology on creative practice, and how technology evolution determines the forms and format of an artist's work, this book contextualizes technological revolutions with earlier encounters between craft and innovation, endorsing a notion of craft practice within computing that needs rescuing from tech industries.

1

The Social Narrative of Technology

I want to begin by asking some questions of the technology that seeks to define the age in which I live, and examine some of the claims made about it as a force within our culture and economy. Firstly, it is worth explaining my objections to the models we are presented with that are noted above from the perspective of technological progress, and then to question the loose application of a notion like creativity to some of their more baleful results. There is a typical assumption on the part of those citing older technologies as the conduits of progress that they are autonomous and, once released into the world, develop according to an agenda driven by the glory of market dynamics. This is a popular approach amongst pop technophiles like Kevin Kelly and is connected to the ideology of free markets and deregulation, neo-liberalism in the technological space, whose ideas have been simultaneous with the period of powerful growth in the presence of digital technology in the lives of all of us. Kelly, for example, has anachronistically applied this idea to pre-historic models of technological development, suggesting that the need for humans to improve nutrition, longevity and the ability to fight has provided the impetus for technology as the natural response to deprivations of any kind. Brian Arthur similarly conflates technological advances with our experience of nature. He sees the initiation of technological process as our logical response to the sluggish speed of evolution in resolving our practical needs. Indeed, for Arthur, the slow processes of biological development are the very foundation of creativity and innovation, with the formation of hope and possibility through technology in long-standing tension with the frustrating relative stasis of the natural world. Sometimes these narratives are balanced with the countervailing influence of humanity, the construction of a culture that informs how we live and, consequently, the technology required to support it. Often the people are left out altogether, in clear preference for the machines that evidently made, make or will make our civilisation. These histories of humankind as the story of technological innovation provide an alternative narrative to that of, say, great events, great men or great ideas. The picture that emerges from this approach is one where, as Williams (1974: 14) would have it, ‘research and development have been assumed as self-generating’ when there may be alternative imperatives in play. For Williams, technology is more likely to be driven by intention, with ‘certain purposes and practices already in mind’, linked ‘to known social needs’.

It has begun to seem routine to us that we should always be switched on and connected, and that this is the proper progress from our dependency on a biological evolution that is too slow to equip us with those special features we can now no longer do without. It is how our presence in the world can now be counted, given that so much of our lives will now be recorded and stored, accessed by anyone who can spell our name correctly, or even misspell it the right way. If they retain the slightest interest in us, it can take them to our Flickr images or to watch our YouTube video that we uploaded to share our wonder at opening the box of the latest product of the Apple engineers. The truth is that beyond the metaphysical claims made for the properties of technology, and these often assume heroic proportions, it is the business plan that determines the effectiveness of the science, a process we will discuss in Chapter 2. But this argument for the historical determinism of the culture of technology is frequently repeated and needs some attention here. Given it can include anything from Babylonic cuneiform to the CD as evidence of a logical, inevitable progression of technology dragging humanity along in its wake, it stakes a claim that the satisfaction of all human desires is located in these systems and that they represent the solutions demanded by a whole culture. This teleology is significant in confirming the ambition of technologists, even where it finds no support in the history of technology itself or in the history of culture and ideas. In most of these arguments, the simplistic technological history of what Jenkins (2008) refers to as ‘delivery systems’ turns out to be the configuring feature of human enterprise. The development of delivery systems, usually assumed as neutral in their impact on the practice concerned, might be something like the progress of music from, say, Guido d’Arezzo’s handwritten musical notation to the published score, to the gramophone record, the Philips’ cassette, the CD to the MP3 download. In the technological domain, this is only part of the story. The rationale for change and innovation that is offered about the past focuses on a justification about transmitting to others a sufficiently faithful version of the original work. This definition is regularly on the march, with the implication that as the logical extension of existing practice, such-and-such a thing would be invented and naturally adopted until it dominated its part of the field, thus standing up to make its contribution to history and society. As will be evident, this is one of the myths of technology, that ‘the prestige of improvement and of success and power was with the machine’, as Mumford (1934: 27) put it so long ago. As the demand created through its various properties begins an arc of manifestation and exploitation, pressure builds for the new and improved as an end in its own right. The progress from one form to another is assumed to be simply a question of how to deliver essentially the same material, in itself an unchanging and sacrosanct part of a creative tradition of human experience. The moment of inspiration is reconstructed as a series of iterative forms supported by a technological narrative. These present themselves in this process as objective and disinterested carriers of human intention, despite prioritising certain features over others. By presenting each system as a contingent mode of communication and transmission, where content is preserved and regurgitated by ever more efficient and faithful means, the historical dimension is retained whilst leaving an open question about how we might encounter it through delivery systems of the future. As part of this inevitable process, new models are adopted and tolerated until ‘something better’ comes along (Jenkins, 2008: 13). This ‘something better’ forges its link in the historical chain through universal adoption and the construction of a social framework around it: access to free music downloads becomes a political entitlement, the subject of legal and cultural dispute, but certainly proof of the efficacy of the technology at establishing ubiquity amongst the computer literate music ‘consumers’, if nothing else. What this consumption consists of, and how enjoyment has been altered by the systems themselves, is regularly elided in a wider argument about the ability to do something and the stimulation of demand to turn ability into desire, desire into need and need eventually into a right. The question of who profits from this state of affairs is cloaked in the sanctity of an argument about such a right, though such calls are regular homilies from the founders of technology companies.¹

As suggested above, the really important claim for these inventions and processes is less the implied technological progress (and this ought not to be quite so taken for granted, given that vinyl is making a comeback), than whether and how their advent really possessed the capacity to shape us as a civilisation. More searchingly and riskily, the gambit cites their impact upon us because they fashion our culture at the same time as they determine creative possibilities within it. This is an interesting move because it is frequently fused to delivery systems themselves as the harbingers of change and cultural symbolism. Willis (1990) provides early examples of this. He showed how the flexibility of home VCRs encouraged reformulation and subversion of the relationship between broadcast television and the viewers. Home users of VCRs were no longer tied to the time constraints of when the programme was broadcast, nor obliged to sit patiently through the advertisements as the cost of watching the programme. They possessed the technology to subvert the intentions of the broadcasters, at the same time enjoying only the specific components of the programmes they wanted to watch by skilful use of the remote control and the VCR’s programming system (Willis, 1990).² In such models, the technology looks positively benign, especially where it overlaps with cultural experience, delivering control and convenience into the hands of an enlightened consumer (the real problem Willis’ subjects encountered with the promise of the VCR to reschedule their TV-timetabled lives was an inability to programme the thing).

Technology as cultural change

The introduction of culture-changing technologies has never been the smooth, market-led fantasy that dismisses the tensions between idea, development, adoption and evolution to focus solely and predictably on outcomes. By this definition, the best technologies always come to dominate through their capacity to assist and meet the requirements of the market. The assumptions of benign environments for such technological change forget that resistance from all corners is not only possible, but likely. From the Catholic Church’s Proscribed List to the Chinese government’s Great Firewall, most authorities reserve the right to intervene in the pace of change, notwithstanding the fact that users of technology can be notoriously fickle and devilishly clever in their application of it. Consumers in all kinds of guises themselves baulk at innovation for a broad range of reasons, giving rise to what Moore (1991) described as ‘the Chasm’ opening up in front of high-tech start-ups once the early adopters and enthusiasts for technology have given false confidence to investors. Ignoring these dynamics by focusing entirely on the final iteration of a technology does injustice to both the technological process and the social transformations they want to claim in support of their case. As Williams (1974:23) noted when observing the technological progress of television, which ‘in its familiar form seems to have been predestined by the technology’. As he points out, this was really a set of social choices in specific circumstances which were so widely adopted that it became ‘difficult to see them as decisions rather than as (retrospectively) inevitable results’. It is far easier to patronise the defeated actors of history than to deal with the moments when the competition of ideas remained in doubt.

Such gentle social change as engendered by technology ought to be balanced with a view of technology that is not always so benign. Indeed, what we can learn from the historical accounts of technological change is the necessity of creating frameworks for dealing with the social consequences of technology. This is habitually omitted from the accounts of technological supremacy I have cited above. No speaker halts mid-sentence having made the stunning connexion between the ability to print books in quantities and the fashion for banning books that took off shortly after, achieving institutionalised status in the reign of Pope Paul IV with the publication of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1559. For more than 400 years, the Catholic Church saw fit to regularly update its list of banned texts; the existence of print and the concomitant rise in literacy prompting church authorities to be increasingly concerned about the potential for the technology to share dangerous or heretical ideas. True, books had been banned before the printing press, but these were often symbolic acts, given the rarity and expense of a handwritten manuscript. For the church, publishing was giving easy access to certain books for those with less discerning minds than the Jesuits who ran the system. It is commonplace today to dismiss such approaches as laughable or repressive, but the Catholic Church relented only as its once-powerful religious authority ebbed away in a secularising world and the policy was thus rendered impotent. Preoccupied with power, yes, but it often argued its bans as the responsible method to preserve social cohesion. It took these authoritative interventions in order to regulate the flow of information, the spread of ideas and the pace of change. The effect was that books became a more risky investment to write and to print, as the benighted publishing life of Voltaire, for example, shows only too well.

An honourable exception to this sin of omission is Naughton (2012), who inverts this issue by jokily suggesting a few serious things that happened as a result of print, the undermining of the Catholic Church being chief amongst them. He goes further, after Gilmore (1952), and cites so much of our 21st-century culture as deriving from Gutenberg’s press that it seems clear in retrospect that this was a defining moment in culture. But the story of print is still set out as an inexorable technological march of truth against authority, until it finally became authority itself. Neither Naughton nor Gilmore accepts the consequences of the printed word as the vehicle for the distribution of ideas, good and bad, for more than 400 years. Undermining the church was clearly not on Gutenberg’s mind (after all, his bestseller was the Bible), but the impact of a print-based culture, like the story of the civilisation that Naughton wants to say it supported, had some terrible, terrifying moments, too. Notwithstanding the jealous guarding of literacy, or the vicious deprivation of it that some societies still encourage, it should be understood that the Catholic Church was finally and fatally undermined by a failure of ideas. The implication that it resorted to the singular defence of prohibition is quite unfair. It didn’t simply leave print as a medium to its critics, but generated as much or more in its defence than Luther’s 95 (originally handwritten) theses had in attacking it. It happened that these counterarguments were ultimately unconvincing, and its authority was sapped as the ideas that sustained it were displaced by those of the Enlightenment. It was the use of the technologies of print rather than the existence of print itself that changed minds and it is perfectly possible the battle with science might well have gone the other way had the Jesuits argued their case more convincingly.

Just as certainly as the positive contributions Gilmore (1952) claims for the printing press (and is advertising really one?), there have been ideological battles, personal vendettas and profound abuses of the power of print leading to conflicts large and small. The authority of the book has been exploited by many a charlatan, as the self-help section of any bookstore will attest, or worse in the hands of those best-selling authors Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Gaddafi. The point is that as the technology of print moved into the background of civil discourse, its effect as a technology was replaced by its exploitation as a cultural force. Its technological credentials cease to matter, as the dodgy neuroscience Naughton cites to support his view would attest: we become accustomed to it as part of our broad cultural experience. More than this, its ubiquity neutralises its impact. The significance of its make-up as a technology is less relevant than its ability to find recognition and near-universal acceptance as the form for ideas large and small. The fact that we now redefine and study it in the context of technology ought not to be enough to support the idea that we have always dealt with it as such. If the Web were not such a text-based medium, we would scarcely reflect on the printing press in such technological terms. It is only in an environment where its properties are seen in the new light of digital technology that we begin to think of it as a technological and not a cultural achievement. The long view that Naughton so implores us to take must also account for those qualities of an invention, however benign its contemporary manifestation, which are either a mixed blessing or such a deeply seated cultural assumption that they are no longer a site of challenge. In this sense, printing is no more relevant a technology than textiles or architecture. Our questions about it arise because another practice, digital technology, has brought it into focus, given that the ubiquitous expression of it, the Internet, is apparently so driven by text, rewarding a hyper-literacy that can combine text with algorithms to make light of previously intractable problems like machine translation or rapid information searching. The issue is more how to interpret that challenge. The use of Gilmore’s list is somewhat disingenuous and one-sided, and fails to accommodate a broader view of the nature of print as a technology, focusing only on how printing supported ‘a social environment in which the idea of individuality made sense’ (Naughton, 2012: 23). This is unavoidable if it is to be identified in technological guise, though as Mumford (1934) pointed out, for all the lionising of the printing press, it was entirely dependent on paper and its technical development for its influence. As a form for ideas, it can promulgate some repulsive ones as much as engendering the enlightenment that Naughton comfortably assumes of it.

This implied separation of technology from culture is not Naughton’s intention. On the contrary, he seeks to make an argument about how reflective the Internet, his main subject, can be of our contemporary cultural practices. But in citing the advantages of print, he makes the link between technological innovation and cultural benefits, in much the same style as everyone else. Technological progress inevitably leads to improvements in the lives of the populations that embrace it, even if these take some time to turn up. In a similar vein, the virtues of the three-masted sailing ship and the navigational aids developed to exploit their possibilities are a favourite example of the political economist Will Hutton (2010: 110–112). Like many who euphemise about the consequences of technology, he likes to describe them as ‘disruptive’, but it should be noted that for some people, like the South American Incas or the Australian Koori tribes, it did not disrupt their societies so much as destroy them.

This conflation of technological innovation with social and economic benefit produces the strange effect of asserting the neutrality of technology whilst emphasising the character of those technologies that are broadly adopted as unerringly positive. As Heidegger suggested, this is a fatal mistake, blinding us, as it does, to the values embedded in the technology and the uses to which it is put (Heidegger, 1978/2011: 217). It is simply too inadequate or confused an argument for the complexities that accompany change of the type we feel we are now experiencing, and elides the essence of technology as a force rather than an object. Our suppositions about the technology that is the printing press have thus far been impossible to disentangle from our assumption that it was surely invented at the point when a means of distributing difficult ideas across distance fairly cheaply was required. It was a representation of that idea in physical form. The techno-centric interpretation of history provides an alternative suggestion. In this, it is the technology itself that gives rise to social and cultural change.

In doing so, a further question about the assumed advantages of technological progress in itself remains to be tackled. Behind the distinctions we can make between technology and the culture that spawns it, there is a more problematic assumption that technological progress is, in itself, beneficial and carries few long-term threats. We will discuss the detail of this further in Chapter 3, but it seems that what technology requires from a culture driven by technology itself is readjustment, often expressed (as we have seen above) as ‘disruption’. The inference for those rejecting the technology is that they will inevitably find themselves on the losing side in technological history as the inevitable claims of the technology as the agent of improvement play out. This may well be true, but less for the progression of a culture than for the imperatives of economics, as the historian E.P. Thompson observed of the Luddites (Thompson, 1967: 97). Inevitably, technologies that present economic advantages or develop new economic realities find themselves foregrounded and rapidly adopted if the conditions are conducive or the opportunity for pecuniary gain is too good to pass up. Whether this brings more general benefits is far from certain.

The first revolution in technology

There are plenty of smaller and more isolated examples of the mixed blessings that technological innovation brings. But the greatest historical lessons for technology can be drawn from that first great age of technological transformation, that long process we now refer to as the Industrial Revolution. Over the 100 years from 1789, the transformation of the economies of Europe and North America came about through what most contemporary historians now agree was the capacity to capture energy, and use it to replace or augment less efficient or reliable means of powering a process. In a lesson not lost on those whose business it is to develop technology ever since, those who owned the technological framework benefited disproportionately from its implementation, largely at the expense of those whose contributions were replaced by it, or who required access to it to remain economic and social participants. The values that Kelly (2010) thinks drive technology did not bring about the smooth transitions or uniform benefits that are implicit in his arguments. On the contrary, if history is a guide, we may well be heading into a complex and turbulent future, requiring huge social effort to extract us from the yoke of domination by technological processes whose underpinning science and economics most of us are unable to fathom. There is a specific lesson we can draw from already, and plenty of more general warnings from history in examples and analysis that ought to guide us. We should regulate our enthusiasm for the innovations of digital technology lest they themselves come to define and reform us, as Mumford noted of the mechanisation of humanity that emerged in the second phase of the Age of the Machine (1934: 146).

The Industrial Revolution was an exchange of such qualities: for the first time the human was being remodelled to the technology of industry rather than using technology drawn from human qualities. Seen in this way, it was the most dubious achievement of the industrial process...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Conference
• 1. The Social Narrative of Technology
• 2. Science with a Business Plan
• 3. Technology Adoption as Ideology
• 4. Technological Systems and Creative Actions
• 5. Can Machines Create?
• 6. The Paradox of Creative Practice
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index