Magic vs. the Imagination - 2

Part 2
So screens with a mix of reality capture and CG enhancement, to a large extent, own our myths now. They do this by making explicitly specific every visual detail of our myths. In the past we had myths depicted on film and TV screens but these were low-res, what McLuhan would have called "cool" media - we were left to fill in much of the detail from our subconscious, the realm of myth, leaving our visualization of myth relatively safe.


But now CG makes visualization of myth what McLuhan called "hot." It is hot because it fills in every aspect of mythic visualization and corresponding soundscape with overwhelming amounts of detail. We're not always aware of how insidious this is and aren't really questioning it from a scientific standpoint. And since this is basically a sociological phenomenon, and since sociology tends to be an unquantified science, it's hard to prove this is true. 


However if you observe kids who are now growing up post-CGcalypse, you'll note that they tend to have fewer and less specific references to common myths in their modes of speech. When left to their own devices, they fall back to the imagery depicted on screens. Again, this is through personal observation, and is anecdotal, but if you talk to 10,000 parents and teachers, you will start to appreciate the common patterns of this and the danger to our mythic selves it implies.


Now, this phenomenon isn't something we can fight by abstinence, in all probability. Individuals might push themselves away from the trough, so to speak, but our culture as a whole cannot. Screens occupy nearly every personal and work context in our lives. The flat-panel is the HD hearth. And myth is not an individual phenomenon. It is a cultural and racial (as in human race, not ethnicity) phenomenon. An individual might experience a version of a myth, but the myth itself is in our wiring, so to speak.

(You're about to say, "I thought you were going to tell us how to get our myths back from screens." I'm just about to get to that.)


OK. Let's try a small mental picture. Imagine it is 200,000 years ago and you and I are hunters on a grassy plain in one of humankind's birthplaces. It's evening. The sun has set. We sit  together, before a fire that spits sparks into the darkness, as I tell you a tale of a hero who journeys into the wilderness to bring back three tokens to please Nature and thus brings in a successful hunt that saves her village. 


We face each other, and the fire flickers between us, and a wolf howls in the distance as I recount the story. There is warmth between us, and a sense of shared purpose. We both want our own individual hunts to be successful, and this story creates patterns in both our minds that relate back to structures that have to do with personal responsibility for the group, evolution into adulthood, and sensual understanding of the principles - the laws, if you will - of the natural system in which we live.


Now, you could accurately say that these principles and thus the story I relate to you before this fire (in this mental picture) is a mythic story, and what's more the image of sitting before the fire and telling a story is, in itself, also mythic. 


The trappings and details of myth are simple. Myths activate images deeply locked up in our selves. Images that go back to a billion years of evolution and written into our genetic makeup, in the wiring of our brains. It all comes down to these simple things. A fire. The story of a journey. My voice and movements as I tell it to you. And you being there, that is just as important. A myth can be personal but to see it reflected, we need two or more people together.


Now where do we find these common elements? I think you're on to me. Yes. 


In live performance.


The question often arises, why even have live performance any more? If we can project a perfect image of a performance around the world, and record it in digital media forever, and ensure total consistency of its presentation, why would we need to continue having live performances? Can't screens depict the performance with greater depth of image, in much more detail, fully spelled out for us. And isn't that consistency good and sustainable as a business? I can spend the sum needed to produce a digitized story and have it practically forever (barring changes in digital storage formats) and be able to sell it over and over. Whereas, live performance? It is variate and imperfect and unrecordable. It cannot be preserved in any way that is meaningful. It doesn't make a good business at all. Ask those who do it - they will tell you that for 95% of them, it is a very lousy business indeed.


But live performance has one thing the screen does not. It brings the elements of myth together. You. Me. The story of a journey. A fire. These things are burned into our genes and will never leave us. And it does these in exactly the low-res way that makes total sense for our wiring. So I would propose that if we cannot get live performance, our mythic selves will, indeed, suffer. 


I could trot out more anecdotal examples to prove this is the case. For example, in towns where children have access to a good drama department, amongst those kids who participate, you see a much higher incidence of creative play in social situations. Though I don't have the proper statistics to back up this argument, and thus am opening the argument up to being disproved on the same basis as it's proposed... still, in a deep sense, we know it is true.


We need live performance, and to a far greater extent than we probably realize. 


That is why so many people still gravitate to this lousy business, even though audiences grow smaller and less willing to leave their screens. Many don't realize what those screens will do to them if they never attend another live performance. Their myths will be sucked out from their experiences, and they will be left with nothing on which to base the core images of their lives.


So go out now and support live performance where you are. Get out from in front of that screen. I'm about to stand up from mine (as this little article is about done). 


Why not you?

Magic vs. the Imagination - 1

Part 1
We are inundated with information, the pundits say. As if we couldn't turn it off when we wanted. As if all the information came flooding past our perceptual filters all at once. As if we didn't like it and didn't make things this way.


Over the past 3 decades the emergence of computers & networks created a unification and a separation of what we call us. We chose the unification and once we experienced it, we chose the separation. As a result, now we are all connected to each other possibly, but are only really connected to those within the all-connect we choose. That's how things are. We know it. We made it that way, whether by making it or experiencing it and letting it wash over us and not moving to a limestone cave. So, that's the end of that part of the story.


There are other, similar parts of the story we won't cover here.


Another part of the story is the growth of reality modeling & CGI to make magic special effects more and more cheaply. Steve Jobs loves to tell this story because he had money to buy Renderman (Pixar) when George Lucas sold it to finance his divorce. (No, he didn't invent Pixar.) The resulting blend of digital reality capture and its increasingly similar-colored simulacrum is the pulpy mesh we now bathe in when looking at screens. This, we're told, is magic. And not just magical magic, but Disney magic, Dreamworks magic, (and now) Comcast magic. Und so weiter.


So we see very real looking dinosaurs (once real), whose software foundation is used to develop very real dragons (never real). And the software is also used to create very real looking monsters, such as liquid androids, armies of robots, giant towers topped by eyes, and weather such as earthquakes, & tsunamis (tragically real. Much cheaper to simulate). We now see these things on a screen & thus have a picture of these things defined in our mind. So we no longer have to work ourselves to picture these things. Part of what our imagination once did, now automated by human artists and technology to allow faster pixel rendering.


This material, is our pulpy mesh, is called "entertainment." To entertain also means "to consider," as in "I will entertain your idea." But here it communicates "that which is defined on a screen."  That entertainment refers to both consideration of a thought and the sensual elaboration and definition of thought could be a somewhat diverting conflation. 


So we entertain moving pictures from our myths, from our storehouses of our adventure and surprise (populated as they are by dragons, talking animal spirits, gods, and images of the future). While these images are fresh, they entertain us. But eventually we habituate to them, and in that habituation we kill our sense of adventure and surprise.


In that way we are robbed of ownership of the pictures to our myths.


End of Part 1.
In Part 2 we'll describe a way to get our myths back from screens.


Lastly, speaking of earthquakes & tsunamis, if you can, please help the Japanese.