Futurismic

There is an arc of progress with human technologies: first comes functionality, then gradual acceptance, and then the aesthetic overhaul. The transition from practicality to personality has always interested me, because it hinges on that point of acceptance, be it grudging or enthusiastic; only then do notions of art start to appear and entwine themselves with functional objects.

Some objects achieve that point of acceptance more quickly than others; these are usually the objects of power, objects that make someone more than human – swords and cars, for example. Slower to achieve acceptance and freedom from stigma are those objects designed to raise the disadvantaged to the same status as everyone else.

We appear to be on that cusp of acceptance with human prosthetics. Granted, there have probably been carved crutches, peg-legs and walking sticks for millennia, but they were only ever crude stand-ins (if you’ll excuse the pun) for a damaged or missing limb. But they represented a refusal to be stigmatised, a defiant embracing of the user’s condition – “This is me; this is my replacement limb. Deal with it.”

Now we can build prosthetic legs that are in some respects superior to the originals, and it surely won’t be long before artificial arms that can replicate (or exceed) the essential functions of their biological equivalents become available to the widening sphere of those who can afford them – and that defiance, that rejection of stigma, will become more prevalent. It’s a stage of great interest to transhumanist thinkers, naturally, but it’s also attracting the eyes of artists and designers who’ve noticed a new human space to colonise with the communication of ideas.

There’s a gallery of cybernetic design concepts – like Hans Huseklepp’s Immaculate Arm, pictured top right – and photo-portraiture over at New Scientist at the moment which will get you thinking about this sort of stuff (it’s what inspired the preceding paragraphs of waffle from me, at any rate), but consider it only a starting point. Sit back for five minutes and think about the ways we already customise the human body for aesthetic effect; then imagine what we’ll start doing when prosthetics are affordable and effective enough to become ubiquitous. It’s closer than you think. [image copyright Hans Huseklepp, reproduced here under Fair Use terms; please contact for take-down if required]

Here’s your starter for ten: when will we first hear of people choosing to replace undamaged natural limbs with prosthetics, be it for practical or artistic reasons? How will the general public react to that? How would you feel if your teenaged son came home with a cybernetic hand in place of the perfectly functional one he had before?

I imagine many of you have seen this elsewhere (judging by the dozens of different sources I saw it bounce through yesterday) but if not, here’s the one and only Amanda Palmer explaining why she’s not ashamed to ask her fans for money:

artists need to make money to eat and to continue to make art.

artists used to rely on middlemen to collect their money on their behalf, thereby rendering themselves innocent of cash-handling in the public eye.

artists will now be coming straight to you (yes YOU, you who want their music, their films, their books) for their paychecks.
please welcome them. please help them. please do not make them feel badly about asking you directly for money.
dead serious: this is the way shit is going to work from now on and it will work best if we all embrace it and don’t fight it.

unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve surely noticed that artists ALL over the place are reaching out directly to their fans for money.
how you do it is a different matter.
maybe i should be more tasteful.
maybe i should not stop my concerts and auction off art.
i do not claim to have figured out the perfect system, not by a long shot.

BUT … i’d rather get the system right gradually and learn from the mistakes and break new ground (with the help of an incredibly responsive and positive fanbase) for other artists who i assume are going to cautiously follow in our footsteps. we are creating the protocol, people, right here and now.

i don’t care if we fuck up. i care THAT we’re doing it.

It’s worthwhile reading for anyone who writes with the intent to sell their work, or those who publish at the small scale of webzines or print mags (or iPhone apps, or whatever other way you’ve decided to do it). As has been suggested before, dead-tree publishing is going to take a comparatively long time to catch up with the business models of the music industry, because the pressures of piracy and freely-available content aren’t so strong yet. But they will be… and it’ll happen sooner than you expect, especially if you just sit on your hands waiting for someone to give you the answer.

So be bold, try things. Throw the spaghetti at the wall and see if it sticks. Hal Duncan’s got the right idea – he’s doing a direct-to-audience publishing experiment on his blog right now. So go throw a few bucks in his hat, and know that you’ve bought good art… and helped feed the person who made it. [image by Martin Pettitt]

(Go throw Amanda Palmer a few coins, too; she’s not just a fine musician but a crusader for independent art, and that alone deserves your support.)

This Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention by Michael Erard pushed a lot of my buttons, and I reckon it’ll be of some considerable interest to other art creators and consumers (writers and readers, for example, which is most of you lot):

I imagine attention festivals: week-long multimedia, cross-industry carnivals of readings, installations, and performances, where you go from a tent with 30-second films, guitar solos, 10-minute video games, and haiku to the tent with only Andy Warhol movies, to a myriad of venues with other media forms and activities requiring other attention lengths. In the Nano Tent, you can hear ringtones and read tweets. A festival organized not by the forms of the commodities themselves but of the experience of interacting with them. Not organized by time elapsed, but by cognitive investment: a pop song, which goes by quickly, can resonate for days; a poem, which can go by more quickly, sticks through a season. A festival in which you can see images of your brain on knitting and on Twitter.

I imagine a retail sector for cultural products that’s organized around the attention span: not around “books” or “music” but around short stories and pop songs in one aisle, poems and arias in the other. In the long store: 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzles, big novels, beer brewing equipment, DVDs of The Wire. Clerks could suggest and build attentional menus. We would develop attentional connoisseurship: the right pairings of the short and long.

Has a hint of the science fictional about it, but doesn’t seem implausible by any means given the way the web is mutating creation and commerce. But this bit deserves special attention:

I imagine an attention tax that aspiring cultural producers must pay. A barrier to entry. If you want people to read your book, then you have to read books; if you want people to buy your book, then you buy books. Give your attention to the industry of your choice. Like indie musicians have done for decades, conceive of the scene as an attention economy, in which those who pay in (e.g., I go to your shows) get to take out (e.g., come to my show). It would also mitigate one oft-claimed peril of the rise of the amateur, which is that they don’t know from quality: consuming many other examples from a variety of sources, even amateur producers would generate a sense of what’s good and what’s bad: in other words, in their community they’d evolve a set of standards. This might frustrate the elitists, who want to impose their standards. But standards would, given enough time, emerge.

This sounds very much like the online short fiction scene to me, albeit a more highly evolved version thereof, and the pparallel with the indie music scenes, especially at a local level, is palpable. I’d be tempted to make “economy” and “ecosystem” interchangeable, though. What do you think – will curation of niche artforms become a form of crowdsourced consensus of attention?

(This is yet another link from Joanne McNeil of Tomorrow Museum, who I’ll stop linking to just as soon as she stops posting really interesting stuff… which hopefully won’t be any time soon.)

Here’s an interesting art installation that involves some science fictional thinking. Toys by Tomasso Lanza features digital renderings of assets to be sold at auction following the bankruptcy filing of a fictional Enron-like corporation. we make money not art explains:

The quick collapse of the company led to a fire-sale of most of ENT’s assets. In the months following the Chapter 11 filing, the liquidation team split the enormous sale across a number of auction dealers. Lanza created a photographic essay of some of the items surfaced by the bankruptcy auction, some of them perfectly mundane (executive chairs, workstations, gold balls and clubs, luxury cars, a range of sat nav, etc.), others fictitious. They are listed in the catalogue of an auction that dealt with low to mid-valued items and leftovers from previous auctions; despite the low-key of the sale, the dealers got their hands on a few items which were sold at much higher prices than originally expected thanks to their unique nature.

The fictitious items are straight out of a near-future/present day satire of corporate secrecy and hubris.

This lot consists of an off-the-shelf viewfinder, plugged into some sort of digital tuning device with the words FTSE, DAX, HSI, DSM200, PHLX/KBW, MIBTEL, NIKKEI, NYSE, NASDAQ etched on. There is no documentation provided, although it is believed that these devices were secretly owned by a small number of executives and used for monitoring stocks and other financial products too sensitive to be displayed on-screen or retrieved on the company’s computers.

Nothing raises groans like a discussion of book cover artwork – especially in genre fiction, where authors and readers alike have frequently found themselves with a great story bound up in an awful jacket. Things are far better than they used to be, though – at least at the cutting edges of fantasy and science fiction, where decent budgets and experienced editors are making wise choices. Indeed, an informal survey of the ARCs and proof copies that cross my desk suggests that explosive growth in tacky book jackets is currently ensconced in the urban-fantasy/vampire-boffing market. There’s probably at least one graphic design guy who makes a living purely from photoshopping vaguely tribal tattoo designs onto the lower backs of scantily-clad weapon-toting women…

But as pointed out by Brian James over at Tor.com, trashy cover art is usually a calculated marketing move intended to broaden a book’s potential appeal. They’re not really designed for those of us die-hard readers who already know what we want; they’re meant to snare the casual browser into making a purchase. Which is all well and good, but it doesn’t feel like much compensation for those of us who read genre fiction on public transport.

But carping aside, why don’t we share a few favourites – examples of great cover art that sold you a great book you’d otherwise not have bought, or examples of cover art so risible you were tempted to rip it off permanently to avoid the shame? The categories can overlap: I remember being quite attracted to the paperback Elric reissues with the Michael Whelan covers as a teenager, but I also remember the ridicule that accompanied reading them in front of my peers.

How about you – got a love/hate relationship with the jacket of a favourite book? Name and shame!