Alternate realities
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Will the real Real please stand up?
In 1968, Michel Foucault wrote a small book, or perhaps a long essay, called Ceci n’est pas une pipe (in English, This is Not a Pipe). There he ruminates on a drawing by René Magritte. This drawing contains the same phrase rendered in a painstakingly naive, practice-makes-perfect cursive. The image also contains an exquisitely rendered image of a pipe. It became the inspiration for a painting called La Trahison des Images. In English, this translates variously as The Betrayal of Images or The Treachery of Pictures.
A deeper paradox
Magritte’s rendered text superficially refers to the paradoxical relationship of reality to painting. That is: the image of a thing realistically rendered is not the thing itself. But for Foucault, Magritte does much more, performing a nuanced and ambiguous visual critique of language itself. The text pipe is also not a pipe, simply an arbitrary signifier, squiggly lines arbitrarily assigned to sounds which are in turn arbitrarily assigned to the reality we recognize as the thing pipe.
La trahison des images,
1928-29
la trahison des éléments d’image,
©️ 2009 by the author
In that spirit, this author created a transformational work based on the Magritte painting. The transformation of the text to Ceci n’est pas une image extends Magritte’s logic to the contemporary defining paradox of digital media. That is: the image of the picture is not a picture. Instead, it’s an accumulation of code, which is itself purely text, translated by an output device into pixels. The title completes the transformation by replacing images with éléments d’image, French for elements of the picture, an approximation of the English picture elements from which we get the abbreviated term pixels.
So, reality is a slippery thing in art! This, even though “real-ism” is a standard that many people who view works of art apply to gauge the worth of an artist.
An ethical dimension
The reality is that reality takes on many guises in the art world. We have Realism, Surrealism, Photorealism, Hyperrealism, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Computer Generated Imagery, and Digital Fabrication. All of these share one thing in common: mimesis, the quality of miming or imitating the real world. But the digital age is making the boundary between the real and the various real-isms increasingly tricky to negotiate.
This has had a profound effect on society, from the rise of fake news to the development of deepfakes and the artificial intelligence upon which they are dependent. As an artist who may one day soon acquire the skill to create your own version of reality, what are the ethical ramifications of your praxis? To answer that question, begin by understanding the history of alternate realities in art and design.
Realism
As a movement in art, Realism is recognized by historians as having launched in France in the 1850s. But the tendency toward mimesis has a history far broader and deeper than we can cover in this title. Still, to understand the relationship of our digital project to the ambitions of mimesis, we’ll sample. The far shorter history of digital modeling has been characterized by a quest for realism in the rendering process. This has largely been driven by design industries such as architecture or industrial design that demand visual fidelity with reality to display the future presence of an object or building. It’s also demanded by Hollywood CGI (computer-generated imagery) special effects. It’s an economical means of modeling everything from spacecraft in Star Wars to ancient Rome in Gladiator. And, of course, the gaming industry seeks to replicate experiences of the world a player might not otherwise encounter.
Ancient realism
In a tradition dating back to ancient fresco work such as that found in the ruins of Pompeii, the quest for trompe-l’oeil (French for fool-the-eye) realism has long been a pursuit of artists in the West.
Renaissance perspective
A quantum leap forward toward that end is found in the Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Italy. There, Masaccio’s The Holy Trinity uses the newly discovered laws of perspective to extend the space of the chapel into the space of the image.
Neoclassicism
By the Neoclassical movement of the late 1700s, painting radiated with stunning realism, from the heroic paintings of Jacque-Louis David to the more humble still life work of Anne Vallayer-Coster. Her paintings are reminiscent of the Pompeiian fresco’s ambitions (with Pompeii being excavated at the time, not surprisingly).
Realism as a movement
Eventually, political restlessness led to revolution and concern with the social status of the working class. While Marx and Engels were publishing their Communist Manifesto, Gustave Courbet in 1849 created a different sort of manifesto: The Stonebreakers. For an era that expected Romantic excess and uplifting heroic themes calculated to support the prevailing social order, this was a painting calculated to provoke the upper classes who patronized the art world. Such work became the center of Realism as an artistic movement.
Its proletarian concerns evolved into a less nuanced, sometimes more didactic brand of Social Realism in the Twentieth Century.
Quite a different strain of individualistic realism also took root in the United States at the same time. Works by artists such as Edward Hopper and the Wyeths evolved into very personal visions and often deep metaphors. Through the filter of Modern, minimalist colorists such as Joseph Albers, yet another iteration of realism culminates in the work of Albers’ protege William Bailey. His paintings exhibit a weird, contradictory Puritan passion. They are nearly as formalist — that is, devoid of meaning and reference — as an Albers homage to a square.
Surrealism
The strain of realism flowing out of Renaissance perspective gave artists the ability to create illusions of objects or spaces, true. Yet some artists, notably the Surrealists, use traditional realist techniques in decidedly non-traditional ways, exploring the eye of the subconscious rather than the waking state.
Surrealism is not just a Twentieth Century art historical phenomenon. Like Realism, it has roots that extend far earlier than its “official” kickoff in the 1920s with Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, and far beyond its “official” death in 1941.
Renaissance “surrealism”
The divine fantasy world of Hieronymus Bosch, a Dutch painter whose most notable works found their way to the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain, inspired the Spanish Surrealists. Salvador Dali and his colleagues considered Bosch the first “modern” painter and recognized in him a kindred spirit across the centuries.
Commissioned by Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, the painting series The Four Elements by Guiseppe Arcimboldo develops not only an allegory of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water but also a metaphor for order brought out of chaos by the Empire. While the fish in Water are less synthetically distorted than Bosch’s hellscape, the “collage” mentality with which they are put together presages pre-Surrealist Dada works by Raoul Haussman and Hannah Hoch.
Modern surrealism
Leaning into Bosch’s penchant for synthesis, Belgian painter Rene Magritte did not need to rely on the world of hallucinations in the manner of the typical Surrealist. The real world, seen through the filter of the pre-conscious (the state just before, and during, waking up), was enough. His directness of transformation is what makes his work as poetic as it is disarming, as tranquil as it is alarming.
Rumors of Surrealism’s demise are greatly exaggerated when one encounters the murals of Alexis Rockman. Combining Surrealist strategies of juxtaposition, visual metaphor, and formal synthesis with contemporary ecological concerns, The Farm envisions a world where genetic engineering makes agriculture a Surrealist landscape made real.
Photorealism
What distinguishes the practice of Photorealism from garden variety Realism is the use of the photograph as a subject, rather than drawing from observation. Thus, the Photorealist is depicting an already mediated reality. In the 1960s and 70s, this strategy came under critical fire, although it can be argued that a tradition of using mechanical aids for observation started 300 years beforehand.
Camera obscura
The camera obscura (a Latin phrase meaning “room of darkness” or “dark room”) was a box with a pinhole, refined with the addition of lenses and screens in the mid-1600s to the degree that it became small enough to be portable. According to artist David Hockney, physicist Charles Falco, and historian Philip Steadman, artists like Jan Vermeer began using tools like the camera obscura to refine their depiction of realistic scenes.
Modern photorealism
In Vija Celmin’s drawing Hiroshima, we are made conscious of the photographic origin of that city’s post-apocalyptic reality: an exaggerated, uneven border between the drawn image and the edge of the drawing, combined with the distressed “paper” of the photo suggests a clipping from a newspaper folded into a scrapbook, a memory of reality. Even the medium—graphite—becomes ambiguous, since the subject is a black-and-white photograph.
Less self-conscious of origin, but no less referencing photographic reality, Audrey Flack goes wild with texture, color, and disorienting reflections. In this manner, Wheel of Fortune (Vanitas) recalls the meticulous works of 17th Century Dutch still-life artists. The self-referential memento-like accumulation of objects, including photographs and other graphic material, creates a different, more personal memory of reality.
Gerhard Richter, who is equally well-known for wild abstraction, created an iconic series of Kerze (Candle) paintings in the 1980s. The candle seems to illuminate not only the canvas but also the room occupied by the viewer. Rapid change over time requires that the observation of the subject occurs photographically. These meticulous paintings take far longer to complete than several candles meeting their demise!
Hyperrealism
Photorealism morphed into Hyperrealism with the advent of extreme high-resolution digital imaging techniques that brought more precision under the artist’s control than ever before. As Photorealists emulated chemical photography, Hyperrealists attempt to match or surpass the data of the digital image, creating a sense of a painting that is more real than real. While these works are not digital, they are about living in a digital age.
The fetching condiment bottles painted by Ralph Goings are photographed, but the artist considers the photograph akin to a musical score, guiding the work but not compelling its interpretation. His interview linked here gives insight into this Hyperreal mindset.
Presence of absence
In Magda Torres Gurza’s tea set, we first see the beautiful rendering of reflection, then we start to notice the pits and scratches, a reality at first hidden by dazzling, polished metallic surfaces. As we do with the salt shaker in Goings’ work, we observe the lens refraction (that six-pointed star) she renders in the highlight on the teapot lid. We also see a disturbing absence: the viewer (and even the viewer’s camera), ordinarily loudly present in such a close-up mirrored view, has been carefully edited out by the artist to avoid ambiguity of the subject such a presence would create. Because of that, there is no trompe-l’oeil ambition: there is no question one is looking at a constructed image, not the illusion of a projected reality.
CGI
Computer graphic imagery, or CGI, more often than not has mimetic ambitions. However, the digital artist’s relationship to realist, surrealist, photorealist, hyperrealist, or trompe l’oeil traditions is largely a philosophical one, based on motivation for doing the work.
In the case of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill’s architectural rendering of One World Trade Center, modeling and digital photomontage techniques generate a decidedly trompe-l’oeil image. For the sake of argument, compare the architect’s rendering with the real-life outcome — wherein the developer cut the white antenna sheath for cost reasons. “I try not to get involved with the aesthetics” is the spurious cop-out by developer David Durst, as if any such decision is devoid of any aesthetic ramification.
Concerning cinematic or gaming CGI… well, it depends. In the amazingly detailed virtual set of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, while we are impressed with the computer graphic imagery, we certainly aren’t fooled into thinking this is actually Rome. On the other hand, how many times has CGI slipped under your radar in a film depicting a contemporary scene? If you didn’t notice, they fooled your eye!
Cybrids: Mixed reality
In 2004, architect and media theoretician Peter Anders noted that designers (and by extension, I will infer artists) use a range of digital tools including modeling, virtual reality, networked collaboration, and digital fabrication, to which list we can add tools like augmented reality and projection mapping. Anders elaborated:
Common to all these is the use of a digital database and a means for its manifestation. Such manifestation varies by technique. With VR the manifestation is symbolic, an interactive display of spatial objects, while with digital fabrication it is physical artifacts produced by digital lathing or stereolithography. The database shared by such manifestations is an abstract constituents of a project—one that effects its materialization. The interdependence of digital and material elements places such projects within the domain of mixed reality, a field of research that combines digital entities with physical settings or artifacts. The causative nature of the … database, however, calls for the identification of a special class of objects that hybridize the material and virtual aspects of their being within one composition. We refer to these entities as cybrids.
Peter Anders
A cybrid gestalt
Anders formulated three spheres — Environments, Behaviors, and Experience — that harbor seven principles for the creation of cybrids, including:
- Comprehensive Space: Cybrids exist in a comprehensive space that comprises the material, symbolic, and cognitive attributes of spatial experience.
- Composition: Cybrids are mixed-reality compositions that comprise material and simulated elements.
- Corroboration: Cybrids offer a range of empirical modes that corroborate one another to a determined degree [sound, for example, correlates to action in a movie or game].
- Reciprocity: There is reciprocity between a cybrid’s physical and cyberspaces such that actions in one domain may affect the other.
- Extension: Cybrids provide users with a coherent spatial environment that extends their awareness beyond the concrete world to a dimensionally rich, mediated space.
- Social Context: Cybrids provide an extended social space.
- Anthropic Design: Cybrids shall be designed to augment their users’ innate use of space to think, communicate, and experience their world.
Much of what Anders can only speculate about in his pre-iPhone essay — the rise of social media as a virtual space, massive multiplayer gaming, and augmented reality — now makes up our new, mixed reality. While his essay is redolent of a digital utopianism that must be tempered by current experience — from “fake news” to the commodification of personal data — these principles create a kind of gestalt which, if employed by artists and designers, can guide the design of mixed realities. One might only speculate how the world would look had Facebook been attentive to, say, Anders’ reciprocity or anthropic design, for example. Let’s explore some case studies.
A SMALL COMPENDIUM OF CYBRIDS:
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Snapchat’s augmented reality
Virtual Reality
Despite the sometimes clumsy limitations the medium imposes, so aptly described by Hettie Judah in her Garage article, VR is attracting artists. On the utopian side, watch the reactions of artists introduced to Google’s Tilt Brush, a means of painting in three dimensions.
Reactions of a more notorious kind were received by Jordan Wolfson’s virtual reality installation at the 2017 Whitney Biennial titled Real Violence. This work came not only with an age restriction, but a trigger warning, both very rare in the art world. Read about the work at New Yorker.
Augmented reality
Augmented reality allows a mobile or tablet device to function as a frame that can superimpose computer-generated imagery onto the user’s view of the real world. Commercial applications aside, this has opened the door to a world of augmented reality sculpture, installation, and performance.
A good example is the above-mentioned Jeff Koons’ collaboration with Snapchat’s augmented reality feature. How can his balloon dog arrive in Central Park? He “projects” the sculpture, really a model in a database, into the park via geolocation coordinates.
What is interesting about geolocation is that, for the time being at least, no one can “own” a virtual space the way they can own real estate. Wary of corporate art monetization schemes, graffiti artist Sebastien Errazuriz collaborated with Cross Lab Studio in an act of cyber-punk resistance to raise questions about the phenomenon by virtually tagging the balloon dog. Read about it at Techcrunch.
Digital fabrication
Angela Eames, ca. 2004
As technologies become affordable, laser-cutting, 3D printing and the like have begun to make inroads into everyday crafting and making. It’s no longer exceptional to see an object printed from Thingiverse or laser-cut puzzles sold by artists on Etsy. The know-how for vector drawing and 3D modeling becomes the only barrier to entry for making digital objects into analog stuff.
In his 2003 book Architecture in the Digital Age, designer Branko Kolarevic discusses the rise of “smooth architectures” and the ease with which digital fabbing tools can create complex curving forms in industrial-designed objects. He argues that, although Baroque design and the expressive curves of Alvar Aalto are precedents, this is something new:
Why this sudden interest and fascination with “blobby” forms? Three dimensional digital modeling software based on NURBS … has opened a universe of complex forms that were, until the appearance of CAD/CAM technologies, very difficult to conceive, develop and represent, let alone manufacture. A new formal universe in turn prompted a search for new tectonics that would make the new, undulating, sinuous skins buildable (within reasonable budgets).
Branko Kolarevic
That last bit is important because as the economies of these complex forms become less onerous, “infinite variability becomes as feasible as modularity” and ” mass-customization presents alternatives to mass production.”
Exciting yes, but a decade later, Michael Parsons cautions us to consider the aesthetic ramifications of complexity for the sake of complexity. He argues:
As the skill in achieving complex forms decreases, so does our societal value of complex formal outcomes. Maybe we need to revaluate our perception of difference, in other words our tolerance for complex design. We need to consider that what were two very different outcomes in the past are now only differentiated by one factor, aesthetics and not skill.
Michael Parsons
Consider these competing visions of enthusiasm and caution as we embark on fabricating a component of our project.