Ray Bradbury, Jaron Lanier, and “The Digital Flattening of Expression”
By Mark Fox March 19, 2014
I had never read Ray Bradbury until I started reading Fahrenheit 451 to my son Lukas last year. About halfway through the 1953 novel there is a conversation between Faber, a retired English professor, and Montag, a “fireman” whose profession now entails the burning of books. Faber is speaking:
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| Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (Simon & Schuster), first published 1953 |
“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”
In reading this passage I was struck by its empathy with themes in Jaron Lanier’s 2010 manifesto You Are Not a Gadget. Comparing an artifact with its digital representation, Lanier writes, “A real painting is a bottomless mystery, like any other real thing…. It has texture, odor, and a sense of presence and history.” A digital image or “digital fragment,” on the other hand, isn’t really “distinct from any other; they can be morphed and mashed up.” Like mediocre writing, it turns out that the digital copy has no pores.
Faber continues: “So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.”
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| Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget (Knopf), 2010 |
The culture that Faber describes is creatively bankrupt because it is disconnected from authentic experience; from life itself. Six decades later, aspects of Bradbury’s dystopian future feel disturbingly present tense. Lanier echoes the image of flowers living on flowers in You Are Not a Gadget when he describes contemporary culture as “effectively eating its own seed stock.” Lanier believes that “Authorship—the very idea of the individual point of view—is not a priority of the new ideology.” Our remix culture, which thrives by cannibalizing older, original works while simultaneously obscuring its sources, is responsible for “the digital flattening of expression into a global mush.”
As visual artists, what can we do to resist this flattening of culture? For one thing, we can continue to create artifacts—physical objects with texture and pores. Original, analog artifacts with quality: sketches, drawings, photographs, print designs, and paintings.
Published in Emigre in 2004, Randy Nakamura’s essay “The Grand Unified Theory of Nothing” posits that, “Yes, design is about analysis and problem-solving, but its fundamental impact on the world (for better or worse) is in the artifacts and form it produces. This is the only way ideas survive in design. To denigrate form and artifact making in design is to destroy its essence and reduce it to a generic role of think tank or consultant.”
As Nakamura notes, “The design artifacts you leave behind will be your ultimate legacy.” Our artifacts will also serve to enrich the larger culture. Go to it!
Mark Fox, partner in the graphic design studio Design is Play, was featured in Designers & Books’ Book List of the Week on March 10, 2014.
Announcements
Louis Kahn: Architecture as Philosophy by John Lobell
Louis Kahn: Architecture as Philosophy
By John Lobell
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Published: June 2020
Noted Louis I.Kahn expert John Lobell explores how Kahn’s focus on structure, respect for materials, clarity of program, and reverence for details come together to manifest an overall philosophy.
Our Days Are Like Full Years: A Memoir with Letters from Louis Kahn by Harriet Pattison
Our Days Are Like Full Years: A Memoir with Letters from Louis Kahn
By Harriet Pattison
Publisher: Yale University Press
Forthcoming: October 2020
An intimate glimpse into the professional and romantic relationship between Harriet Pattison and the renowned architect Louis Kahn. Harriet Pattison, FASLA, is a distinguished landscape architect. She was Louis Kahn’s romantic partner from 1959 to 1974, and his collaborator on the landscapes of the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, and the F.D.R. Memorial/Four Freedoms Park, New York. She is the mother of their son, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn.
Five Oceans in a Teaspoon by Dennis Bernstein and Warren Lehrer
Five Oceans in a Teaspoon
Poems by Dennis Bernstein
Visualizations by Warren Lehrer
Introduction by Steven Heller
Publisher: Paper Crown Press
Published: September 19, 2019
“From a kidnap note for a world held hostage by an A-bomb, to a Holocaust survivor’s tattooed arms where the numbers just don’t add up, Five Oceans in a Teaspoon re-envisions a poetry memoir via a textual kaleidoscope... Bernstein and Lehrer are the Rodgers and Hart of Visual Poetry.” — Bob Holman, poet, poetry activist and chronicler, and founder of the Bowery Poetry Club
Ballpark: Baseball in the American City by Paul Goldberger
Ballpark: Baseball in the American City
By Paul Goldberger
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Published: May 2019
An illustrated, entirely new look at the history of baseball: told through the stories of the vibrant and ever-changing ballparks where the game was and is staged, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic.
Charleston Fancy by Witold Rybczynski
Charleston Fancy: Little Houses and Big Dreams in the Holy City
By Witold Rybczynski
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: May 2019
Charleston, South Carolina, which boasts America’s first historic district, is known for its palmetto-lined streets and picturesque houses. The Holy City, named for its profusion of churches, exudes an irresistible charm. Award-winning author and cultural critic Witold Rybczynski unfolds a series of stories about a group of youthful architects, builders, and developers based in Charleston: a self-taught home builder, an Air Force pilot, a fledgling architect, and a bluegrass mandolin player.
Teaching Graphic Design History by Steven Heller
Teaching Graphic Design History
By Steven Heller
Publisher: Allworth Press
Published: June 2019
An examination of the concerted efforts, happy accidents, and key influences of the practice throughout the years, Teaching Graphic Design History is an illuminating resource for students, practitioners, and future teachers of the subject.
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