What do I mean by replicants? I am not referring to androids - artificial humans in a science fiction sense - rather I use the term to refer to those products that aim to reproduce the material world, generally with obsessive attention paid to minutiae, using techniques completely divorced and even alien to such details. Take for example the visual effects and gaming industries, at least those portions dedicated to the reproduction of the photo real. With Nvidia’s recent unveiling of their Turing architecture comes a big push for real time ray tracing, a rendering technique capable of vastly improving the “real ness” of images compared to less computationally complex techniques owing to its more accurate modelling of light (Etienne, 2018). The industry is driven by an obsession to produce more accurate looking fire, water, reflections, shadows, and on. More convincing images. Not images that we haven’t seen, but ones that we have - the familiar. Something from reality is always left out of the process. Fake flames never produce any heat, never pose any real danger or potential for it.
There is the synthetic food industry, a growing sector that focuses on reproducing products ranging from alcoholic beverages to meat. At Endless West technicians sit at desks with beakers and computers to concoct artificial whiskeys (Goldfarb, 2018). Again something is necessarily left out - the entire justification for such endeavours is to reduce the environmental impact.
Note that for the producers it is not enough to develop a nutritious food or an alcoholic beverage, or to make a powerful and evocative image. The focus is always on replication, and by implication, replacement. Industrialists working on artificial meat specifically try to emulate the taste and texture of a specific meat (Simon, 2018), while those developing synthetic wines aim to copy the taste of specific premium wines (Goldfarb, 2018). All the latest technology is put to use not to create the future but to replicate the past. New foods will be old foods but with less ethical concerns, new movies will be old movies, even with the chilling prospect of replicating long dead actors1, and so the future dies.
In the realm of digital music, innovation is centred around the replication of sounds produced by real instruments in real settings, while even pure electronic music is far more devoted to the slavish replication of the sounds of the 80s and the synthesisers that produced them than to the production of new sounds. On the music of the new millennium, Jaron Lanier asks "Where is the new music? Everything is retro, retro, retro." (Lanier, 2011, p. 129)
It does not seem to occur to the creators or consumers of all these virtual goods that these technologies could produce new types of products, that a synthetic protein could be delicious without tasting like any specific meat, or like meat at all, or that computer animation in film could enable vastly more experimentation within the medium. As a simple example of the stultifying conformity on display look no further than the ranks of family animation these days, where all characters are drawn with the same simple-shape, big-eyed aesthetic paired alongside painstakingly detailed rendering - light and hair and water and cloth simulations - as contrasted with the much more diverse range of animation styles explored in the heydays of traditional animation. For sure when computer animation arrived there was experimentation early on, but such experimental phases have become increasingly short-lived, the resulting “paths” more rigid.
Film itself is an inherently replicating media, but even within its traditional scope of being purely representational it has become more limited. Box office revenue is increasingly dominated by a few major franchises, those franchises are themselves based on old properties and obsessed with remaking and rebooting themselves. New franchises are accepted only so far as they conform to known and well worn audience expectations and preferably reference familiar media. Ready Player One was adapted from a book and was a new “IP” (in mindless mediaspeak) but only in technicality for it relied entirely upon reference to other media for its contents (Cuck Philosophy, 2018). Other recent “new” successes like Stranger Things similarly bank heavily on nostalgia, replicating the past - down to releasing the synth soundtrack on cassette tape (Liptak, 2017) - with modern techniques. Online discourse is dominated by discussion of old media (Lanier, 2011) and anyone who has followed any of the news aggregation websites for more than a few years (or maybe just months) has been witness to endlessly repeated, repackaged, and regurgitated clickbait.
This is not a necessary phase by which the technology is improved that will pass. It’s not as though only once we can convincingly replicate the smoky flavour of barbecued meat without ever burning wood in the process that these techniques will then be turned toward envisioning the new. Rather it is part of the cultural pathology that has become so obsessed with replication that to conceive of anything else becomes increasingly difficult and eventually impossible (Cuck Philosophy, 2018).
Real materials and real processes present opposition, working with them creates conflict, out of conflict there is necessarily compromise. Heating real meat in the real world required real flame, flame which could be kept by burning wood. But the burning wood does not just produce heat, because one can never do only one thing, and its smoke contains complex hydrocarbons that go on to settle in the meat ('Fire', 2016). The smoky flavour originated as consequential rather than intentional.
Virtual technologies offer unprecedented control, because that is what their users demand and because it is in their nature. Such control changes the dynamic between tool and tool-user - there becomes an incredible reliance on specificity. Because they have no materiality, the resistances offered by virtual technologies are of a wholly different character. With no materiality to challenge expression, creators instead turn to the Rolodex of reference for inspiration.
What remain as recognisable aesthetics are inevitably the by-products of a virtual technology's failings to replicate reality rather than how slavishly it succeeded. Pixel art emerged out of an appreciation for what at the time was seen as a limitation to be grown out of - a working within the discrete pixels of the digital display. Polygonal art applies a similar appreciation to the low-poly techniques of early 3D-rendering. Tellingly, these are all material artefacts of the medium. As much as virtual technologies seek to be free of the physical domain, they must always be realised in practise in some physical medium.
I use the term virtual technologies, and yet there seems to be no clear distinction to be made. Digital technologies is too limiting, as it fails to cover advances in the life sciences. In fact all technologies are in the process of becoming virtual as they are subsumed under a computational worldview. Never have we had so much power to realise our imagination, and we have perhaps never been so unimaginative. Somehow we need to find our way back to more genuine sources of inspiration, back to a confrontation with material reality, to a relational understanding of our world as opposed to the frictionless aimlessness of our electric sense perceptions.
Footnotes
1 I previously wrote about my concerns with digital actors here.↩
References
Blade Runner 2049 (2017) Directed by Denis Villeneuve [Film]. Culver City, Calif: Sony Pictures Releasing.
Cuck Philosophy. (2018) Hauntology, Lost Futures and 80s Nostalgia. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSvUqhZcbVg (Accessed: 26 August 2018)
Etienne, S. (2018) 'Ray tracing' could bring the biggest graphics jump in a decade. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/8/20/17698314/nvidia-volta-gpu-ray-tracing-graphics (Accessed: 26 August 2018)
'Fire' (2016) Cooked, Series 1, episode 1. Netflix, 19 February.
Goldfarb, A. (2018) The Pivot to Whiskey. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/23/17703454/wine-whiskey-synthetic-climate-change-lab-made-ava-winery-endless-west (Accessed: 26 August 2018)
Hayles, N. K. (2001) Writing Machines. London: The MIT Press.
'Fire' (2016) Cooked, Series 1, episode 1. Netflix, 19 February.
Goldfarb, A. (2018) The Pivot to Whiskey. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/23/17703454/wine-whiskey-synthetic-climate-change-lab-made-ava-winery-endless-west (Accessed: 26 August 2018)
Hayles, N. K. (2001) Writing Machines. London: The MIT Press.
Lanier, J. (2011) You Are Not a Gadget. London: Penguin Books.
Liptak, A. (2017) Stranger Things' soundtrack is getting a retro cassette and vinyl release. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/9/15767998/stranger-things-soundtrack-retro-cassette-vinyl-release (Accessed: 28 August 2018)
Simon, M. (2018) Lab Grown Meat Is Coming, Whether You Like It Or Not. Available at: https://www.wired.com/story/lab-grown-meat/ (Accessed: 28 August 2018)
