Artists have a way of reading the future. Da Vinci on air travel, Poet William Blake prefiguring Einstein’s space-time continuum. Here, a set of uber Hollywood moguls side step our current fixation for VR and 360 degree films for the future’s heir.
The future isn’t virtual, it’s real — in a way that our senses deal with objects in this perspectival ecosystem. No goggles, no perceived hyper-real. No, the future is advanced AI animatronic kinaesthetically programmed to be cognisant of their surroundings to please their guests.
This isn’t a new idea. J.J Abrams, and husband and wife team Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan (brother of Inception creator Chris Nolan) have rebooted a franchise. The original #Westworld was directed by sci-fi exemplar Michael Crichton in 1973 staring a moody Yul Brynner.
Its theme, as now, re-presents wealthy guests paying to be immersed in a world in the distant future. A world contrived along the lines of Jason and the Argonauts(1963), where human engineers play gods looking down on their creations and tourists indulge themselves by sleeping with prostitutes and murdering the hosts — human’s greatest flaw and fantasised pleasure become the ultimate theme parks offerings.
Its debut has caught the critics and audience’s imagination. The artistry is evident, our conscious tilt inevitable. Watch as ensuing digital conferences re-launch AI.
Technology to foresee the future infects many of us. Jules Verne may be ordained as conceiving science fi-action but you only need to look at 14th Century Dante’s inferno to realise the artists’ mind at work back then, and further back still with homo sapien’s opus dei of all technologies, the alphabet.
Westworld trades of another asset, the greatest underrated technology of them all, memories. By its repetitive return to the origins of a scene, we witness our own freudian expositions. That moment in your sleep when you keep returning to the same location, again, and again, and again. This phenomenological experience is one of the least understood, but one of the most explosive.
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Art, architecture, design, medicine, engineering have all sought alternative addresses towards comprehending a world that evolves, driven by the white heat of technology. Mainstream video journalism, even with its technology remains epistemologically rooted in its traditions. You’re inclined to think, Journalism the art of understanding the world is far too important to be left to traditional journalism. We have been made to view one reality.
No one has a claim on our perceptions, yet in the 1990s when 29 young journalists and I picked up a camera and were told to go and shoot news, without the support of a producer, reporter or director, we bored into journalism’s construct to find its inadequacies.
We found that, not all events command the same formula. We found out that because that formula was well known, PR and liars had a way of goading journalists, of forcing their hands to adopt their points of view. Whatever journalism’s ideals were, it became enslaved to the dark forces. Journalism’s reboot may require technology but it is also a philosophical re-calibration inside race and culture.
Cut to ten years later and that innovation makes more sense now than it did back then. What was creative then has purpose now. Journalism, the art of attempting to represent events that invariably have happened, got its reboot but from an unlikely source — the impressionists and expressionists.
If the impressionists want to bring you their interpretation of the world as seen through their critical eye, the expressionists also discarded the conventions fixed by grey men, in order to shock our senses. Journalism, to a group of videojournalists, became a substrate and a canvas for its audience to see events that needed to be memorable and expressive while they unpicked the thread of a forced realism of causality.
Just because that event happens doesn’t automatically mean that one over there is affected. We humans tie them together to form our narrative. Back in the 1940s, with all due respect to that generation, broadcasters having found their elixir deemed us (the audience) too stupid to understand its complex methods. By the way that’s factual — a statement by the BBC Director General, so matters had to be simplified.
Realistic painting post renaissance became the line to hang a fresh way of seeing things. The world as seen in scientific perspective replicated by Jean ingress’ photo-realism art e.g. The Valpinçon Bathert in 1808 testifies to a brilliance which was becoming passe.
When Monet presented “Le dejeuner sur l’herbe” in 1863, he was scorned by the experts, His approach abrogated every tenant of classical painting, such as perspective and form. It would take 30–40 years for impressionism to be truly appreciated by the populace and to understand how it inflected our senses
Westworld provides us with food for thought for the next gen, whilst memories, impressionism, and expressionism provide a window to seeing a new order of the day but we won’t take it!
Westworld provides us with food for thought for the next gen, whilst memories, impressionism, and expressionism provide a window to seeing a new order of the day but we won’t take it! ( my memory allusion)
Westworld is available to watch:
Date: Tuesdays.
Start time: 9 p.m. BMT
TV channel: Sky
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Source: Medium