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Art and Culture, Art and Technology Technology is the magic word these days among musicians; the piano and the guitar as we know them have only a few more years to go, and we are now faced with the ubiquitous computer, this "double sided" God which can open simultaneously the most awesome mind-expanding vistas and the most redundant cliches according of course to the taste of the user. We have seen earlier the foremost importance of the intention behind artistic activity and how this intention will alone in the end determine the place of Art in the future generations. We have also reviewed how music in America and elsewhere is used as a drug to keep the masses from questioning their daily dreary routine. There is a recent trend attempting to capitalize on the fashion of personal computers and other cheap digital musical gadgets, that would like to see everyone buy a little computerized instrument where the music writes itself, much in the same way as people bought an instamatic camera or a TV set in the sixties. In order to achieve this goal the manufacturers of these gadgets are inventing all sorts of codes and basic languages that can allow uneducated people to store in computer memory any patterns and easy rhythmical acrobatics that can thus deceive them into thinking of themselves as real artists and creators. For instance, there is a "Casio" portable musical device that uses the universal bar code found on canned food for supermarket inventory, to notate musical compositions that you can record in the instrument's memory by simply reading the code with a light pen in the same way that the cash register reads the prices on the cans! Almost all the newest digital musical devices are preset, of course, with an ever-increasing variety of preset flavors, just like soft drinks. What we are witnessing here is the first stage in the invention of automatic music machines to be added to the home collection of every idle middle class doodler. People will want to argue with me that this popularization of computerized musical gadgets will ultimately benefit the real musician by decreasing the cost of fancy synthesizers and bridge the gap between the electronic musician and the masses. This is a very American concept indeed which stipulates that water should trickle from down to up! However, the mass distribution of Super 8 cameras in the sixties does not seem to have had a significant influence on the film industry in general or the creative filmmaker in particular. The same could be said about 8 track cartridge recorders, cheap video cameras, as well as most other similar Pay'n Save innovations. As artistic technology keeps evolving, the initiate is becoming further and further removed from the hobbyist, who, for one thing can never afford state-of-the-art equipment with an unrelated 9 to 5 job and a Macy's credit card, just in the way that modern movie directors progressed so far beyond the Super 8 standard by the mere requirements of their professional endeavors. Yet, the TV commercials created with $85,000 a minute computer graphics equipment would like to convince the hobbyist, in order to sell him their garbage, that he also can be a star with a "Casio"! But the TV commercials must be right and I wrong, and most people will disagree with my view here since we are told every day now that the difference between professional gear and semi-pro or amateur equipment is shrinking and all but disappearing. In response to that, I shall content myself to simply encourage people to take a good look at the gear used today by the U.S. Army?s R&D labs to see if they still think that they will soon be able to compete! This purposedly misleading approach creates disillusionment among the buyers of cheap "miracles" and a tremendous saturation of the audiovisual market where true and devoted artists often have trouble even recognizing one another among the electronic bubbles. So we reach the same acknowledgment here in regard to technology that was reached in the preceeding chapter regarding the present fate of the Arts: Under the absolute rule of the lowest common denominator, all forms of creative energy whether scientific, religious and/or artistic are used as a drug to dull the mind and fleece the purses of people who are nothing but a consumer number. In such a world without faith, without scruple, technology serves the Art businessman just as it serves the Pentagon in the annihilation business: Dollar for dollar, since making money is the end that justifies AND creates all means, pacify all needs (and even those of the dead some believe). Therefore there is an ongoing arms race in music technology and if you are on the "good" side, you can indeed win fabulous worldly powers: to hypnotize, for example, millions of people into buying your music, create popular cults with global promotion instead of talent,etc..., powers certainly that Beethoven or Mozart did not possess. In spite of their controversial quality, these semi-philosophical remarks should not be overlooked by serious students of the Arts, and their relationship with the process of civilization. Our present so-called Democracy is against Nature (and subsequently against Art) in its attempt to simulate and to create by force an artificial and illusory equality. The transcendent inequality of Nature is the source of its creative power, its evolution. Artificial equality is sterile and can only result through the politics of the lowest common denominator in the hell of absolute uniformity. Having said that, it would nonetheless be infinitely pretentious and demagogic for an individual artist to single-handedly attempt to change radically such a worldwide reality. This is in fact a power that no one has at the moment and that cannot be acquired: Heroes are easily affordable nowadays and Christs are only newsworthy for a few headlines. Even war is a spectacle that rarely makes the front page of newspapers for over a week. The era of great world leaders, individual evolutionary agents, is over. Reality is a show created by the medias, and the borderline between real war and video games is becoming ever more elusive. Confer all the WAR GAMES. It is only natural after all, that, as population expands dramatically, the leeway of Each is reduced by the entropy of the Many. But those in power obviously do not agree to that and want at all cost to enforce and preserve their version of illusory equality since they have the best shares in stock..! Is great Art henceforth doomed in spite of genuine technological breakthroughs (such as the synthesizer which allows an individual alone to simulate an entire orchestra)? The current fashionable answer is generally that the great Work consists now in EDUCATING THE MASSES to prepare everyone for the dawning planetarisation of consciousness. This answer neither helps nor satisfies the creative genius whose role has rarely been that of an educator in his own time. Furthermore, who will be educating whom? This is the trickiest question since, as we have seen, the medias have already reserved this task for themselves. We, in utter disagreement with this view, believe that the people can very well educate themselves, as they always did in the Past, and the only favor they ask for that is to be left ALONE, not to be told any longer what to buy, what to think, what to be, by the garbage salesmen who use them, pry on them, and keep them in ignorance to reuse them indefinitely. The inherent genius of humankind is best stimulated when faced with having to solve a problem without any instructions. Individual experimentation is always the key to innovation. In this respect, the recent marketing of factory-preset synthesizers (following the trend we mentioned earlier of cheap portable home systems) has been detrimental already to the quality of current electronic music. In contrast, we shall commend as an example the method of the great electronic designer, Serge Tcherepnin. Serge is known to sell his extremely sophisticated and user-accessible musical synthesizers without any set of instructions as to how they should or could be used in order to stimulate the latent imagination of the buyers. And this is indeed a cost effective, practical solution to the problem of education: free access to one's own inventiveness! To paraphrase a great philosopher: "We do not want happiness for everybody, but rather the happiness of each." This is our answer. We do not question here the desperate need for common standards among electronic instruments and obviously interfaceability is paramount; In fact, a greater standardization of operating systems and hardware configurations would soon reduce further the need for paternalistic instructions, and far from setting the limits of personal freedom, would rather greatly expand it. We could take Nature again as our model in its archetypal yet infinitely diversified elements: wood remains wood whether in a guitar or in a policeman's night stick. The genetic code represents an extraordinarily standardized approach and there is no power in Nature that deprives a mouse of access to the code in order to sell it at higher price to a whale. The medias and the merchants who tirelessly and cynically capitalize on the gullibility, the "openness" indeed, of people in the modern art world (much as their counterpart the deadly weapons distributors), are not only the enemy of Art and Civilization, but above all the agents of the degeneration and decay that overwhelms the human mind when deprived of any creative challenge and responsibility. And, as we have seen earlier, it is the ultimate purpose of fascism (in every guise) to eliminate entirely the need for personal revaluation, questioning and change. Whether this overwhelmingly negative influence comes from a Totalitarian State or from privately owned multinational corporations should be absolutely irrelevant to the creative-minded human being who wants to follow the path of his/her true Inspiration without ANY string attached. The freedom we are talking about here is not for sale and cannot be warranted by an existing political system, this now should be well understood. The plight of the modern artist for the acquisition of powerful technology is engendering a tremendous confusion and inspires us to compare it with a new version of the FAUSTIAN MYTH: The temptation to sell one's "soul" to the Mephistotelian Media in order to buy smarter electronic tools is harvesting everyday its fill of mesmerized victims. Since, to top it all, these same Medias set the State of the Art in electronic recording and will not accept to release any smaller budget production, we quickly realize that we are dealing with a complete Monopoly of modern expression on an unprecedented scale: The creative result in the electronic Arts is embarrassingly conditioned by the size of one's pocketbook! The more famous records and/or movies are increasingly but a mere enumeration of gadgets and special effects as if the entire creative energy of the artist were concentrated in the struggle to show off all his tools rather than in their innovative use (for which these artists have, alas, no time left before the next wonder gadget comes knocking at their door and ask for the next payment). It takes indeed an incredible amount of energy, EVEN FOR THE RICH, to keep up with the hyperbolic proliferation of slicker and smarter instruments! Our new Faustian Dilemma appears lately to have touched even our old avant-garde electronic composers who under the pressure of having to upgrade their hardware (at least minimally), are all trying their hand at Hollywood hits. Obviously, Universities could not compete for long in budget size with Hollywood and something had to be done. So even the last diehard eccentrics of sound for sound's sake are quickly converting to the easy dazzle of sound effects and New Age mush for money. Isn't it dreadfully symptomatic that the most advanced special effect packed movies using the most advanced computer techniques are but modern cartoons for the spoiled and idle children of the Computer Age, while utterly devoid of deeper spiritual content? This debilitating trend is bound sooner or later to upset the more "cultured" people and has already contributed greatly to their suspicion of Technology, which is, again, a feeling justified by the lower use of Technology rather than by the machines themselves. And we can only hope that such abuses of the intelligent audience will soon elucidate a healthy reaction against the "programmers" and not against the means... We might have to wait for a general overdose of cheap audiovisual glitter to pass before a deeper and more inspired utilization of these technological tools can come of age, unless the power of a few highly motivated beings can succeed earlier to reverse the present degenerate pattern and provide us in spite of all odds with masterpieces of sublime music, making a more enlightened use of Technology...? We are certainly striving for that and are not going to wait around. |