In this month’s Wire magazine, the electronic musician Mark Fell (of SND and Sensate Focus fame) writes a short article on the relationship between technology, creativity and inspiration. You can read it here. In some ways this is nothing new. Fell’s viewpoint mostly mirrors that of Tom Jenkinson (Squarepusher) as put forth in his great ‘Collaborating With Machines’ essay from way back in 2004. The basic idea that ties both together is that a one-way, human-dominated relationship with machines/technology will result in a limited outcome whereas engaging in a dialogue between human and machine, as equals in a way, can result in unexpected and therefore more interesting outcomes. Fell’s piece comes with an extra focus on the way in which structure gives rise to meaning and purpose, that supposed limitation is there to be subverted but not erased. Contrasting Thomas Dolby’s “perfect” synth – connected directly to his imagination – with Phuture’s genre-starting exploration of a Roland TR-303, he shows that “we can redefine technology not as a tool subservient to creativity or an obstacle to it, but as part of a wider context in which creative activity happens”.
Activity is a key word here. Jenkinson echoes it with the phrase “the machine has begun to participate”. The fear (if we want to call it that) among many is that such activity on the part of the machines undermines the role of the human figure; the composer, the artist, the genius. Genius is a tricky subject. David Byrne and Austin Kleon argue against it, Simon Reynolds argues for it. All genius essentially is is the ability to maximize inspiration, to bring a spark to its fullest potential. Where that spark comes from would appear to be irrelevant What Reynolds calls “the little matter of will” is, when taken to an extreme, what Jenkinson and Fell decry as foolish Western resistance of the inevitable; death.
However, it would seem the main problem is not genius itself but the way in which it is set up or rather, held up. It has been set, through the centuries of Western art and thought, to represent something divine. It was the something which comes from nothing. This is thankfully a faded idea in today’s culture, though the kind of re-creativity espoused by Kleon would seem to me to take things too far in the opposite direction. Fell, Jenkinson and Reynolds all seem to find the middle point quite well, to understand the creative process as a process, without reducing it to the mere sum of its parts. They understand that to make art you need friction of some sort, a kinetic energy which will become heat and hence, a spark.
As we can so often, we can bring this conversation back to John Cage and contemporaries of his like Jackson Pollock, Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram. With these artists there was a resistance to the idea of technology as an implementation of fixed purpose. A tool was there to be used but not necessarily in the accepted way. By doing this they create a friction. They go against the idea of pure function, against rules that cannot be bent or broken. Cage took apart the formalities of Western music, Pollock undermined the visual art tradition, Derbyshire and Oram both opened up new worlds of sound design with equipment never meant for the purpose. They were all, to one extent or another, interested in playing with the limits of technology and finding a way to go past their inherited understanding of it to create something that could only happen in conjunction with the technology itself.
Looking around at the music of today, technological fetishism is obvious on every side. Sound becomes a signifier of authenticity, reflecting a wider creative-industrial environment where it is assumed anyone can succeed if the right shapes are pulled. Meet the right people, wear the right clothes, use the right guitar, that’ll get you to the top. Whether you’re looking for the authentic 808 sound, you’re deep into programming Max/MSP or your only concern is a piece of wood with a hole and some strings, it is important to remember that attempting to dominate the technology will result in it resisting your god-given inspiration and you hitting the inevitable brick wall of your own imaginative and physical limitations. Wouldn’t it be great if we could all approach whatever creative task we have set ourselves with the same mindset as Phuture did, “as an absorbed exploration, and a series of ‘what if?’ questions that lead to a non-theoretical understanding of the system. Here, decisions are not made in resistance to what is encountered but in response to it.”
