I highly recommend watching episodes from the 1970’s BBC show, Connections, available on YouTube. The premise is great in that a singular invention is tied to a series of connections and disparate discoveries that make for a rich understanding of how ideas and invention happen. This post is a similar record of my discoveries over this past week as ideas, discussions and tangents converged.
I will start with a very inside the studio problem. An upright donkey drawing bench is a terrible thing. In the image above is the studio I teach in and this is someone else‘s setup. In my class the 2nd row is easels, I never use the standing donkey. This has to do with memory loss and how best to draw from observation. Drawing on a pad of paper angled below the model on a donkey means you have to look at the model, remember what you see and then project what you remember on your pad of paper at a completely different angle. Distortion and drawing from memory instead of from the observed model is typical.
I had only thought of the memory processing of the angled drawing surface as an issue, but there is the further problem of what happens when the system of perception, and representation is challenged by disjointed physical space. The translation of the planes of the forms as perceived by the eye have to be adapted by the hand at a completely different angle. The physical act of drawing is not optical, it is full body immersion. How the physical environment supports the delivery of content is just as important as the meaning of the content.
There is a similar problem in using photo reference when you are learning to draw. I have tried to explain how it almost locks my hand and it comes back to the necessary processing that the body does as it engages with the world. The photograph has no space, texture, or presence and our perception is fooled and accepts the simulated photo space, but cognition is not fooled. This disconnect means the image is read without the rich embodied physical processing that active engagement is sparked by. It doesn’t mean that photos are not meaningful or inspiring, it’s just that the physical engagement with real life has a profound effect on how our perception and cognition processes this content into a drawing. Drawing being active, needs the body to be engaged.
And then we have the prompt. In the Star Trek TV series, the spaceships had food replicators that the crew could use to make meals. How wonderful—instant gratification and none of the bother of food. No more use for farmers, grocery stores, cooking, cleaning….just calories to fill us up. We would no longer have restaurants or share family recipes, all the communal events around food would pass into oblivion. Our calories would be met each day and our taste will die, and our world will shrink. The activity we see as drudgery, and tasks to be automated are actually the point of the enjoyment and meaning of social life.
The prompt is a death sentence for the value of visual media. Especially visual media that is inspired by the active engagement of the body. Just as the internet devalued knowledge and wisdom through monetization of our attention. We have welcomed a plague into our communication devices, but the effects are not likely to mirror the result of the Black Death. In the 14th century, the tyranny of the feudal system broke as the economic order of the serfs and Lords collapsed with peasant rebellions after the devastation of the plague. We are being offered a techno feudal future, as A.I. is projected to destroy countless jobs and transfer wealth to the platforms that will control every aspect of our life.
“the (inter)net's emphasis on the light-speed transmission of data for commercial gain, combined with our all-too-human hunger for diversion and distraction, has given rise to information empires of unprecedented scope. Our new emperors give us all the information we can consume but starve us of knowledge.”
Nicholas Carr in the Tyranny of Now.
We don’t have to choose this future that so many are telling us is inevitable and transformational. We can make choices about how we consume media, who we follow, and the causes we support, damn the transactional, the terms of service we are being offered is not good enough, we must demand the transformative. The revolt we need begins by not believing the hype, calling out the slop, the terrible waste of resources, the reductive and sad referential image in place of the reverential. We can feel the ground beneath our feet and our tangible embodied engagement with reality is what feeds us, connects us, and makes this beautiful life worth living.