Magicians and conspirators
Magicians and conspirators
This started as a one-act newsletter but it grew some arms and legs.
Burning man.
Ideas to conjure with.
Atmospheres and apertures.
A collaborator not a god.
No wonder.
Some thoughts on toil, teamwork, ambition, jeopardy, and the right kind of magic.
1. Burning man.
Why don't we set a man on fire? Storm Thorgerson, Co-founder of Hipgnosis.
There's a man on fire on the cover of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here album. The idea came from a conversation about the lack of sincerity in the music business, and how artists were being ripped off. This prompted someone to remark that, "people get burned in this business all the time." It was an incendiary comment.
The story of the image is well told in the Netflix documentary, Squaring The Circle, about the Hipgnosis design studio. All the quotes in this section are from the documentary.
Hipgnosis co-founders Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey "Po" Powell were the creative conspirators behind iconic album covers for artists like Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney, AC/DC, and Peter Gabriel. They're probably most famous for the light-splitting prism on the cover of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.
Once Storm Thorgersen gave voice to the idea of setting fire to a man, it was never a question of whether they would do it. It was only a question of how.
This is the days before computers. So there was no fakery here. Storm Thorgerson.
The only way to set a man on fire and make it look for-real was to set him on fire. Aubrey Powell.
The two of them conjured the idea into reality, with the help of a stuntman called Ronnie Rondell. In Squaring The Circle, you hear why this was a particularly dangerous stunt. In most stunts involving fire, the stunt-person is moving, which allows them to predict and control how the fire will behave. For this image, Rondell was standing still, making him a hapless patsy to the caprice of the flames around his head. There are images of Rondell being doused with fire extinguishers after a breeze whipped the flames onto his face.
These days you could prompt this idea into existence using AI. You could show a man on fire without actually setting a man on fire. But it wouldn't have the jeopardy. It wouldn't cause you to wonder at the ambition, ingenuity, and courage of the people who made the image. The idea would lose its human texture and ambiguity. It would lose its magic and its story. And, in that sense, it wouldn't be art.
It was also just an amazing thought of a man on fire shaking the hand of another man, not being perturbed that he was on fire. So therefore the fire must be metaphorical. However, the fire wasn't metaphorical, it was real. So there was always an inner contradiction to this picture. Storm Thorgerson.
2. Ideas to conjure with.
The word conjure is derived from Latin words that mean to swear an oath together (as does a jury). So, to conjure is not just to bring into existence as if by magic, it's also to commit and conspire. The creatives behind grand projects are conjurors in both senses. They are magicians and conspirators. Every worthwhile idea is a conspiracy.
When we talk about “an idea to conjure with,” we’re describing a concept that people will conspire over. People will "breathe together" to bring the idea to life.
Hipgnosis was in the conjuring business. Any successful visionary is in the conjuring business.
Putting a human on the moon (and returning them safely to earth) before the end of the Sixties was an idea to conjure with. When John Kennedy (JFK) shared this vision, he entered into a conspiracy with an entire nation. In his address to Congress in 1961, he actually made this conspiracy explicit.
In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon. We make this judgement affirmatively; it will be an entire nation, for all of us must work to put him there. President John F. Kennedy, address to the US Congress, 25th May 1961
It was an outrageous idea; seemingly impossible. But it gave the USA, through NASA, something to prove, both to itself and to the world. The idea was conjured into reality through collective vision and ambition. Making the idea happen was more impressive than having the idea in the first place. Indeed, as Kennedy said later, the project would be undertaken precisely because it was hard to pull off.
Jurgen Klopp (JNK) came to Liverpool FC with his idea for high-intensity, “Heavy Metal Football.” But the whole club had to conspire with him to make it a winning formula on the pitch. Culture-changing ideas rely on conspiracy. The vision of an individual is only half an idea until it becomes the vision of a team.
Strategies are culture-changing ideas. Strategy is about changing the game in your favour. And that involves redefining the things that matter and changing the way things get done. What matters and how things get done are the essence of culture.
Strategy changes culture. So a successful strategy has to capture the imagination of everyone with a role in implementing it. It has to be an idea that the entire organisation is happy to conjure with. It’s magical when it works. And it works through conspiracy.
3. Atmospheres and apertures.
I'm just back from Berlin where I took in a couple of photography exhibitions. The Museum für Fotographie houses a permanent exhibition on behalf of the Helmut Newton Foundation, called Private Property. Neither Newton nor his work are to everyone's taste, but the exhibition is fascinating. It goes behind the lens to tell the back stories to Newton's ideas, his aesthetic, and some of his most iconic images.
The temporary exhibition at the same museum was Chronarama: Photographic Treasures of the 20th Century. It contains 250 photographs from the Condé Nast archives, taken between 1910 and the late 1970s. The collection documents the evolution of the fashion industry, with commentary on how it influenced, and was influenced by, society and popular culture through the decades. It's a Twentieth Century who's who of artists, politicians, actors, musicians, sportspeople, and supermodels.
Every image in both exhibitions is a conspiracy. Every shot is a conspiracy between the photographer behind the lens and the subject in front of it. Behind every photograph there's a story of how two people conspired to create the mood from which they conjured the shot.
In the exhibitions, some of these back stories are explicitly told. But you don't need a curator's text to know that there's a story there. You know that the photographer's craft is as much about atmosphere as it is about apertures. You know that the photographer's manner and body language put the subject at ease. And you know that the right words were said at the right moment to elicit the pose and the expression that you're looking at now. You can feel the easy humour, the smouldering tension, or the candid intensity in the room at the moment the shutter clicked. You can see the conspiracy.
You don't get that with images of people created by an AI. You can't conspire with an artificially rendered representation of a person and it shows, by which I mean it doesn't show at all.
4. A collaborator not a god.
We're social animals with a keen sixth sense for social dynamics. So we're fascinated by creativity as a social endeavour. It's why we love "making of" content. How did the director draw those performances out of their actors? How did an immensely talented, multidisciplinary team of artists conjure that scene into being? We want the conspiracy behind the content.
Do we, can we, get this with AI?
Well you can't spin off a tourist attraction like The Making of Harry Potter (Warner Brothers Studio Tour) from an AI-generated film. With an AI film there's no physical evidence of the conjuring behind the film - no actors, no props, no set design (no physical sets), no costumes. There are no conspiracy stories of how human ingenuity overcame technical challenges, other than how someone prompted the AI to generate the images. There are plenty of people trying to make their "prompt expertise" sound interesting, but AI "making of" stories are dull because they're lifeless. They're dull because the human conjuring and conspiring has been abdicated to an unconscious black box.
This is the difference between using CGI to enhance filmmaking and using AI to do filmmaking. CGI is a tool that elevates the conjuring endeavours of human creators. It enables the conspiracy. It doesn't replace it.
They actually sank a ship to film the Kraken sequence in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. The Kraken's tentacles are computer generated but the filmmakers, actors, and stunt-people conspired to do as much in camera as possible.
I'm in favour of using CG for what CG is good for and using real practical elements wherever possible. They have a scale and a realism that's hard to do artificially. John Knoll, Visual Effects Supervisor.
Do I want to watch a film that has no making-of extras, no conjuring back stories? No. I want my stories human conspired rather than AI contrived.
Perhaps you can conspire with an AI in a way that enhances the wonder of human creativity. James Bridle is exploring this space. He's interesting because he's an an artist as well as a technologist. He has skin in the conjuring game. He wrote this recent post in which he describes how he asked ChatGPT to design a chair based on the materials and tools that he had to hand, and then he built the chair. He conjured a chair into existence with the help of an AI.
I didn’t want something which replaced me, or the interesting bits of work, but something more like a smart carpenter’s mate, to do some of the sums and make interesting suggestions, and leave me to do the fiddling and the sanding. A collaborator, not a god. James Bridle, Artist & Technologist
This put me in mind of Marshall McLuhan's repeated assertion that artists are the only people who can truly comprehend and successfully adapt to new technologies at the time of their introduction. Apologies on his behalf for the gendered nature of the last two sentences in the following quote. They are a product of their time I'm afraid.
The ability of the artist to sidestep the bully blow of new technology of any age, and to parry such violence with full awareness, is age-old. Equally age-old is the inability of the percussed victims, who cannot sidestep the new violence, to recognise their need of the artist... The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implication of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964
5. No wonder.
The rock group OK Go gave a fabulous TED talk called How to Find a Wonderful Idea. It's about how they find (not have) the ideas for their inventive and hugely ambitious music videos, all of which are arch examples of the art of conjuring. Lead singer Damian Kulash talks explicitly about the importance of ambition and wonder to their ideas.
Conjuring a crazy idea into existence creates a sense of wonder. It feels like magic and you want to know how the people behind the idea pulled it off. You want to peek behind the curtain of the conspiracy. You don't get this sense of magic and wonder when there is no conscience behind the creation, when there's little risk and no jeopardy in the production, when an idea is rendered by a machine.
There's another TEDx talk, given by Adam Sadowsky, the chief engineer responsible for the design and build of the Rude Goldberg machine in OK Go's This Too Shall Pass video (see below). Sadowsky sets out the ten commandments that were the brief for the machine.
The first commandment was No "magic".
They knew that the wonder of the idea would come from keeping it mechanical and analogue, and shooting in one take, with no post-production effects. The magic happens because there is no "magic". And the viewer is immersed in the conspiracy from the start. Behind the scenes is always in front of the camera in this video.
AI prompting and rendering are poor relations to human conjuring. You can't admire the ambition of an idea if it's all in a day's work for a machine. The viewer can't be a co-conspirator when there's no conspiracy to join. And if you use the wrong kind of magic to realise an idea, you destroy the wonder.