Hu YongwenPerhaps for the first time in this century, it is possible for us to invent entirely new aesthetics – as long as someone takes the reins from a technologist.
Wouldn't it be fun?
In 2021, the metaverse is surging, and the biggest momentum maker is Facebook, the world's largest social network. In October 2021, Facebook announced a name change to Meta, showing the company's ambition to fold everyone into the metaverse. So people can't help but ask, "What is the metaverse?".”
Meta and creative agency droga5 answered this question in Meta's first brand ad. Henri Rousseau's 1908 painting "Tigers and Buffaloes Fighting in the Tropical Forest" jumps from 2D (2D) to 3D (3D), and the tiger in the painting says, "This is the dimension of imagination."
Surprisingly, the first major ad for Meta's rebranding was a museum. ** begins with four young people looking at Rousseau's "Tiger and Buffalo," which currently hangs at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
When they look at the frame, the tiger's eyes twinkle and the whole painting comes to life, turning into a three-dimensional animated jungle. Tigers and buffaloes, toucans and monkeys, and mandrills in the trees, all began to dance to an old carnival song, and the children jumped along. Fruit trees in the gallery grow around them. Above the rainforest canopy, in the distance stands a mysterious hexagonal portal, and beyond that, on the ethereal Red Mountain, is the towering skyline of a great tropical city.
When the whole process is nearing the end, a message from Meta appears on the screen that reads "This is going to be fun". The scene suggests that Facebook may be returning to its countercultural origins in Silicon Valley: the psychedelic dream of a global community sharing a collective hallucination.
The commercial cartoon "The Tiger and the Buffalo" employs the popular logic of "van goghimmer sive experiences," in which dreary Old Dutchman's paintings of starry nights and ominous wheat fields are projected onto walls and floors, creating a shrouded spectacle, attraction, and backdrop.
What is the Van Gogh Immersion Experience?It is a realistic virtual reality (VR) exhibition of Vincent van Gogh's paintings. These exhibitions are held in cities around the world, including North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and are often set in large gallery spaces. Visitors move from room to room, and the walls (sometimes floors or ceilings) are decorated with moving projections of Van Gogh's work, sometimes accompanied by animations, narrations, or scents such as cedar, cypress, lemon, or nutmeg to help visitors immerse themselves more deeply in the work. Some of the activities involve virtual reality headsets that take visitors through the artist's experience.
Art professors have criticized this practice, arguing that these exhibitions are more about showing and viewing than about art itself. The exhibit fails to show the artist's brushstrokes (which was a key factor in Van Gogh's artistry), especially with the depth of the original, which is not perceptible from the projector's image. But fine arts experts also admit that these exhibitions popularized Van Gogh's work, bringing them to a wider audience.
And in terms of audience response, the market has proven the organizers of the exhibition right. There are currently at least five different competing Van Gogh experiences touring the United States. The replica has surpassed the original. It proves once again that modern art is not just a copy, but a copy that outshines the original.
A vision for the future of digital art
Whether it's Meta's commercials or the Van Gogh Immersive Experience, it is assumed that viewers will only be able to enjoy the original works of art while they are being destroyed. This is in line with Facebook's theme, which offers a pale simulation of friendship and community as a substitute for the real thing. Facebook incarnates Meta and promises to take us further into the realm of illusions.
While the company's release asks viewers to "enter the imaginary world with Meta and explore endless possibilities in 3D," many skeptics believe its vision of the future of digital art is too limited and simplistic. For example, setting the dream of the metaverse in an art museum brings a counterversely frustrating feeling — the underlying idea seems to be that art museums would be cooler if they were turned into three-dimensional dance clubs, and that everything digital would automatically trump anything analogue would. This is a simplistic and crude view of digital progress that is no longer worth refuting today.
Aesthetically, the commercial is very quirky and funny. However, we can't help but feel a certain sinister feeling in these slightly tense, talking animals and surrealist images. The ad opens with Tiger saying, "This is the dimension of imagination," a direct reference to Rodserling's The Twilight Zone. Frankly, this homage to classic sci-fi grotesque drama is terrifying, because "Yin Yang Demon Realm" sits somewhere between light and darkness, representing "a state of mind between reality and fantasy", and where the chasm between the valley of human fear and the pinnacle of knowledge lies, a space of imagination that we call the Yin and Yang Demon Realm. And as we all know, the counterculture tour of Silicon Valley later went completely against it. So, the last sentence of the advertisement, "This is going to be fun", no matter how it sounds, is more like a directive than an invitation. It's not going to be fun.
However, even the most skeptical can't help but be drawn to the idea in Meta** that it wants to create the virtual space of the future on the basis of artistic traditions.
In Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Rousseau and his contemporaries (Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Pablo Picasso, etc.) were busy inventing bohemian modernity, creating new ways of life, and ways of seeing the world. And in our century, this visionary role seems to have shifted from the artist to the engineer, to Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk.
Who else is trying to invent a new universe?Who dares to weave grandiose utopian fantasies?Artists don't do that anymore. It's the Promethean founders of Silicon Valley who are trying — and often failing.
One of the big issues about the metaverse is that none of these immersive things have been made, neither the jungle nor the technology that displays it. You can't really do that in a museum. It's just an ad for Meta. But the more we watched the ad and the more Zuckerberg gave a keynote explaining his vision, the more we felt like he didn't know what he was doing or selling.
Unlike when Apple launched the iPhone, Met**erse (metaverse) is not a physical product. It's an abstract concept that Meta itself may not even fully understand.
A year later, we see Meta's metaverse fire quietly extinguished, because Zuckerberg has not learned from the construction of virtual ** worlds over the past 20 years. For example, it's like the world has come to the Renaissance, and they are immersed in cave paintings. They really have all the money in the world, but can't figure out how to develop the virtual world beyond 1995.
People enter non-gaming virtual worlds as a digital gateway to the world and community, as well as an opportunity to connect with others and create something special. However, Zuckerberg's marketing of the metaverse as a way to use virtual reality-powered work meetings or hang out with friends is anything but revolutionary technology that really misses the mark when it comes to creating something for the right audience. They also missed the understanding of the current state of the industry, and the public has become Xi to "** games that are no different from movies".
Whether it's in terms of people's visual expectations of virtual worlds, or in terms of what people actually do in a non-gaming experience, which is making things, Meta has tragically failed. Creativity is the killer app for the virtual world. In fact, Zuckerberg wasn't entirely unaware of this, and much of his keynote was a call to thousands of "creators" to help build an effective metaverse, promising that they would be paid for it.
Actually, it's not good for a company, but it's not for an artist, and they will definitely develop better when they are open.
Contemporary art has been relegated to classical art because it has not completely shaken off the dominance of painting and sculpture, traditional materials and ancient methods of production. At the same time, companies outside the art world are using digital technology to reinvent timeless masterpieces into projection tourist attractions and animation. But few artists did what Rousseau and his peers did: embracing the reality of the new technology of the time, that is, photography, and breaking the old ways to create something new.
An artist with the spirit of Rousseau appreciates the potential of new mediums and wants to make art for the metaverse and the wider public. Like Rousseau, he does not reinvent old works of the past, but comes up with fantastical scenes from his dreams: scenes that he has never seen in his life, presented in a style that he has never seen before. Today, perhaps for the first time in this century, it is possible to invent a completely new aesthetic – if only someone takes the reins from a technologist.
Meta's proposal for a creator economy is not appealing. Creatives, creative agencies conceiving a vision for the future for a large company is not the real way out for art. The question is not whether today's children can appreciate Rousseau's masterpieces, but that their elders, our generation, do not know how to come up with something that might be compared to Rousseau's people – we have forgotten how to imagine a completely different world. Therefore, it is necessary to restart the imagination and invent new aesthetics.
Abandon machine illusions and revive the truth of art
A year after the metaverse boom, generative AI is in the air. AI-based image generators such as DALL-E2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion make it possible for anyone to create unique, hyper-realistic images by simply typing a few words into a text box.
Strange drawings began to be seen on social media. The style is still grainy, but immediately recognizable as something new and meaningful. This is how the world became familiar with text-to-image software, which can create images based on written or dictated instructions.
In September 2022, the annual art competition of the Colorado State Fair in the United States awarded awards in all regular categories: from painting to sculpture. But there was one contestant, Jason Allen, who didn't make his work with a brush or clay block. He created it with Midjourney.
Mr. Allen's work Thé tre D'Opéra Spatial) won a prize in the fair's competition for emerging digital artists, and sparked a fierce backlash from artists who accused him of essentially cheating.
These apps have understandably made many human artists nervous about their future – wondering why anyone would pay for art when they can produce it themselvesThey have also sparked a heated debate about the ethics of AI-generated art, with some claiming that these apps are essentially a high-tech form of plagiarism.
To all the objections, Mr. Allen scoffed. "It's impossible to stop, art is dead, man. It's over. AI (Artificial Intelligence) wins. Humanity loses. ”
In the emerging world of "synthetic**", the art or images we see often have a dreamlike state that we are Xi used to associate with the human hallucinations experienced by painters and other artists. In the case of conversational chatbots, the assumption of AI developers is that they should minimize or even eliminate any chance of the AI hallucinating. Ironically, one might think that text-to-art AI is designed to intentionally execute and exploit the illusion of AI.
Illusion has a long history in the history of art. The history of artistic illusion coincides with the era of psychological science and technology (psychiatry, experimental psychology, and psychoanalysis). It also covers a vast field of experience that sits somewhere between horror and ecstasy. Imagination feeds on examples, it does not emerge from nothing. The history of artistic illusion is thus intertwined with the art of the discovery of psychopaths, and it is ambiguous in that it involves both established artists such as Picasso and the representations of what Jean Dubuffet calls "barbarism" (or "counterculture") art, which for a long time were marginal. In fact, this ambiguity is precisely one component of artistic illusion.
The main developments in this period of history are either related to the specific experiences of the artists, sometimes marked by the time they went mad and were in mental hospitals, or to established trends and movements, whether romanticism, symbolism, expressionism, surrealism or psychedelia.
One might be tempted to see Surrealism as an early achievement of artistic illusion (before the psychedelic movement), which blended Rimbaud-esque super-insight, rational mysticism, and the new intellectual tools forged by Sigmund Freud. In his famous Letters of a Prophet (May 1871), Arthur Rimbaud formulated the precept that governs the history of "voluntary" illusions: "The poet must make himself a prophet by the long, enormous, and reasonable confusion of all the senses." ”
Thus, Antonin Artaud pits the "lie of existence" against the "truth of illusion", that is, the existence of a perfect alternative to realism, a world ruled by the hallucinatory gratification of desire. For him, any revolutionary transformation must involve this basic, radical revolt. As Oscar Wilde once said, "Truth is seldom pure, and it is never simple." ”
So, image generators can't replace human artists yet. GPT-3 4 (Natural Language Processing Models) are incredibly powerful, but they are only as good as their training data. Both GPT-3 and GPT-4 realize their power through a huge training dataset. However, such a dataset cannot be hand-picked for some sensitive, delicate value. They are most likely built around simple, easy-to-capture targets. And such a goal is likely to push us towards the crudest and simplest artistic values, such as addiction and carnival, rather than more subtle and abundant values, such as the illusion of desire and madness.
There is a fundamental problem with this kind of program: art is now data. True artificial intelligence would be a computer that gains consciousness, is self-aware, wakes up and decides that one day it wants to draw, and even goes mad, creating confusion and becoming a manifestation of an alienated, unlifeable status quo – rather than a database that collects every single image of the internet, compiles and compresses them, and extracts them when the user enters certain prompts.
Hallucinations are dreams, they are the product of imagination, they are the devil's, they are supernatural experiences, and the madman who produces hallucinations is called a visionary because he sees things that others can't.
Hallucinations have the property of alienating strangeness. It's pain, it's horror. Since space is doubled, perception is inconsistent: people can perceive both what and what they don't. In its art form, it is a total absorption, a salutary alienation;It is joy, fulfillment, and ecstasy. It determines the breadth of imaginative art, far beyond the reach of machine illusions. More importantly, it breaks through the existence of lies to the truth.
If we accept the claim that the ancient Greek philosopher Plato declared that artists are far from the truth, art will not be able to serve as a thriving force for political and social change. Therefore, the call to restart the imaginary world and invent a new aesthetic is aimed at artists who present their contact with the truth in a visible and intelligible realm, encouraging them to approach the subject of truth in a metaphorical, experimental or unconventional way. The image generator is nothing more than a remix, and the value of the artist is to continue to come up with new styles, new styles, new ideas.
It's all about faith
Let me conclude with a fragment from a ** A History of the World in 10 Chapters by British writer Julian Barnes.
As the name suggests, Barnes makes up an entire history of the world with several fragments of his own writing, one of which is the process of writing Theodore Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa.
Another tells the story of a father and daughter who live in Ireland and are named Colonel Alex Ferguson and Amanda, who travel to Dublin to see a traveling exhibition of Riccoeur's masterpiece.
The painting, twenty-four feet long and eighteen feet wide, depicts the surviving crew of the French gunboat Medusa on a raft. ......The painting is now on display in Dublin and in the Rotunda.
Instead of going to the rotunda, as they had been told, they went to another amusement ,...... to play against itColonel Ferguson brought his daughter to the exhibition hall, ** Panorama of the shipwreck of the French gunboat Medusa and the deadly raft activity:
The rotunda exhibited stills 24 feet long and 18 feet wide painted in paint, but here they saw nearly 10,000 square feet of moving canvas. Before their eyes, a huge picture, or series of images, gradually unfolded: not just a scene, but the whole shipwreck passed before them. Scene after scene, colored lights hit the unfolding canvas at the same time, and orchestral accompaniment sets off the dramatic ...... of eventsBy the sixth scene, the poor Frenchmen on the raft appeared in more or less the manner in which Monsieur de Riccault had first depicted them. However, Colonel Ferguson commented that it was much more spectacular to show their miserable situation with moving pictures and coloured lights, and to accompany them, and he went so far as to point out to his daughter that the soundtrack was "Long Live Henry!".》。
That's where to go," said the Colonel, as they left the gallery, with the Colonel excited, "and the painters should be careful with their brushes."
Amanda didn't answer that. But wait until the next week, she returns to Dublin with one of her five siblings. This time, she went to the rotunda.
There she admired Mr. Richard's paintings. The painting is static, but in her opinion, it contains movement, light, and a unique way of expressing it – seriously, in some ways, these things in the painting are more than tacky moving scenes. When she got home, she told her father the truth.
This is the way to go. "Novelty alone doesn't mean it's valuable. His daughter replied, a somewhat pretentious tone at her young age.
In a way, Amanda thought, it's all about how you look at these things. Her father saw the cheesy phantom simulation, accompanied by colored lights and trills, as a true portrayal of the tragedy of the shipwreck;In her opinion, the simple and still images embellished with paint on the canvas are the most realistic reflection of reality. The main problem is also faith.
There are two interpretations of everything, each with the help of faith, and giving us free will is to give us a choice between the two.
Therefore, whether it is a metaverse or a non-metaverse is a matter of faith. Whether it is ChatGPT (a chatbot program based on large language models developed by OpenAI, an open AI research center in the United States) or non-ChatGPT, is a matter of faith. Whether it is the old aesthetic or the new aesthetic is also a matter of faith.
The author is a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Peking University