Ripping off the future
Welcome to the 79th edition of this newsletter!
With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If you want to support my work, you can sign up for my Patreon. This will get you access to exclusive material every week.
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Ordinarily, I don't necessarily mention what I publish on CPhMag.com here. It's not that I want to hide it. But you might be reading it anyway. But I'll make an exception for this week's piece, in which I attempted to summarize my thoughts on AI pictures.
These days, such pictures are being widely discussed. I will have to say that I'm less pessimistic about the general repercussions of them on our larger conversation than most people and more pessimistic about AI images playing a meaningful part of the world of art.
I don't know to what extent I was able to explain why I think that AI has bad art built in (or maybe bad-art making). In a nutshell, the main problem is that good art lives from a sense of uncertainty, from a sense of risk. That's not what AI images deliver. You prompt them to show you something you already have in mind. Which, I suppose, is fine if you're into that kind of stuff. But it's not a particularly good approach to making meaningful art that stays with you.
Over the past two decades, I've been following writing around Silicon Valley. The immediate reason is that many things developed there affect me directly or indirectly. But there is another reason. You can view such tech writing as a canary in the coalmine: it says a lot about the country as a whole. It's very revealing to peel back the outer layers and look at the ideology that is communicated below.
I don't know to what extent you're interested in Twitter. You might not be. Or maybe you are, and you're sick and tired of Elon Musk. Or maybe you're a fan. Either way, even if you're not at all interested in Twitter and/or Elon Musk, I think this long article is absolutely worth your time. It combines a lot of information that really matters, and it does so in a smart and very engaging manner. For example:
By the second decade of the twenty-first century, fewer and fewer tech journalists were cheerleaders; more and more began to ask difficult questions about how the products their industry had once celebrated were actually changing the world. The contradictions of Silicon Valley’s defining ideology—a hodgepodge of market libertarianism and utopianism—were relentlessly exposed for the flimsy, self-serving sham that they were. There were stories about Amazon’s decimation of bookstores and the publishing industry, the abusive Chinese factories where iPhones were built, and, eventually, of social media’s ability to foment racism, hatred, and even genocide. An industry that had never really had to deal with real journalism was suddenly flooded with journalists.
The ending of the article gets at the real crux:
Twitter has always been indicative of a larger problem: of a tiny group of tech founders controlling the digital public sphere. Now, however, that problem has grown significantly worse and more dangerous. The person controlling Twitter is a raving conspiracy theorist.
There's a new autobiography of sorts by Janet Malcolm that focuses on photographs from the late writer's life. I haven't read it, yet. But I'm interested.
There ought to be a word for when you haven't actually seen a piece of art or you haven't actually read a book, but you've read a number of articles/ reviews about it. I honestly don't know whether it's a good idea to read such material first. I'm thinking that when it's well written, it can be good.
I recently read two articles about Malcolm's book, which I thought I'd share. Brian Dillon appeared to fall down on the more skeptical side:
What makes Malcolm’s writing on photography worth reading is first, I think, the confidence and acuity with which she notices things—as if staring at photographs is a training for the close looking at people in which she is about to become expert. And second, the way this noticing is sometimes too much for her, as she shifts from aesthetic evaluation to a sort of disgust, exaggeratedly expressed.
You'll have to read the whole piece to see why I thought that there was ample skepticism (which ultimately might say more about Dillon than Malcolm).
Sam Adler-Bell appears to ask for the impossible:
And yet, it can’t be denied that Still Pictures is a very different sort of book than Malcolm’s usual fare. Its interior is not at all like the elaborately adorned parlors through which Malcolm usually shepherds the reader. Rather, this room is small and spare, as if rented for the purpose. There is no menace in it, and very little intrigue. An elegant woman sits in a straight-backed chair with a box of photographs in her lap; she thumbs through them while telling a slow, quietly moving story. Every so often we see her eyes go distant, then narrow and glint; something delicious has occurred to her, something devastating. We lean closer, feeling a charge in the air. But she does not betray herself.
Reading Still Pictures, I felt myself wishing for Malcolm to go deeper, to twist the knife. What would a memoir written in the Malcolm-style be like?
How would one go about doing with oneself what one is doing with (some would argue: to -- I remember how upset photoland was when Malcolm wrote about Thomas Struth) others?
After all, if anything, Malcolm's method (if we want to call it that) was trying to infer something about other people's motives by observing them and possibly allowing them to say just a little bit too much? After all, you can't be a witty observer of your own motives, and for sure you can't have your own motives interfere with your own. There can be no interference. I would think that Malcolm needed that interference to go, to use Adler-Bell's term, "deeper".
In any case, now I'm even more interested in the book. I should read it.
I'll admit, though, that usually, I wait for the softcover to come out. It's not that I'm cheap (even though honestly, I have to be). It's just that I don't have unlimited space for books. And I also have come to dislike hardcover books when it comes to reading literature of any kind (photography obviously excluded). It's very banal: I just don't like the weight of the object.
Kenzaburo Oe died recently. I had never read anything he wrote. The only thing I had read was his magnificent long Paris Review interview. You absolutely will want to read it. It's incredible.
Having read the interview, I had always thought that OE's writing would be more traditional. Maybe not quite as traditional as older writing. But certainly not as cutting edge as many of today's writers. Following Oe's death, I ordered The Silent Cry.
Boy, was I wrong. I'm almost thinking that of all the Japanese authors I've read, this book reads the least Japanese to me. By that I mean that you can usually tell if a book was translated from Japanese. I don't mean this as criticism. Most languages have their own quirks, and translation mostly preserves at least some of them.
Here, the quirks are all Oe's, and the book is just amazing. I haven't finished it, yet -- it's the kind of book that I don't want to read too quickly because I don't want the experience of reading it for the first time to end quite yet.
But man, did Haruki Murakami rip off Oe. Literally in the very first chapter of the book, some guy climbs down a pit and sits in it to get away from the world. On Amazon, a reviewer noticed this, too. But he said that Oe (writing in the 1960s) had ripped of Murakami (who was writing decades later). A curious idea.
I read this book a while ago. I enjoyed it, but as a former physicist I probably was a little bit less fascinated by the characters than someone who has no background in the sciences.
A little while ago, I came across an interview with the author, Benjamín Labatut. It's well worth your time.
Betrayal is important for writing. For life too. One must always betray something. And since I’m unwilling to betray my parents, my friends, or my country, I prefer to betray my tongue.
I had never thought about betrayal as a source for writing. I don't know what to make of that.
After a long time, I made myself a cup of a particular Japanese green tea again. It's a finely ground gyokuro. At times, I've struggled with it. It's very intense. On some days, I can't take it.
Maybe this tea is like good art. On some days, I can't take it because it's too much.
Art has to have the potential of being too much, right?
In any case, if you're one of the kind souls who sent a little money my way so I can maintain my tea habit: thank you! I really appreciate it.
The Japanese have a word for the sentiment expressed in/with "after a long time". You'll use it when you meet someone whom you haven't seen for a long time, say: Ohisashiburi desu ne. It's such a long time (that we haven't seen each other) or After a long time (we're finally seeing each other again).
I had the idea of looking through photobooks that I hadn't looked at for a long time, recording my response. They're available on my Patreon. I've recorded three so far, Alec Soth's Niagara, Doug Dubois' All the days and nights, and one more that's not published yet (I won't spoil the surprise). Doing these has been surprising for me in all kinds of ways. If you're curious... well, sign up for my Patreon. I think you'll like them.
The sun is out, and it's warm. This is all relative, of course. But it's maybe the first day that feels like spring here. I should go outside and see the world. I think I will.
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg