RANT #8
RANT #8
trash, art, and trash-art
When everything around us is cultural trash, trash becomes the new medium, the lingua franca of the digital age. And you can build culture out of trash, but only trash culture: b-games, b-movies, b-music, b-philosophy. Maybe this is what digital culture is. A monstrous mountain of trash, the ash-heap of creativity’s fountain. A landfill with everything we ever thought of in it. Grand, infinite, and unsorted.
Bennett Foddy, Getting Over It
On May 2nd, 2023, the Writers Guild of America started a strike. There are a lot of issues wrapped up in this strike - residuals in the streaming age, "mini-rooms" that push aside writers in favor of showrunners, etc. - but one of the most publicized is the issue of AI writing in television. On the issue of AI, studios and producers dismissed writers' concerns off-hand, a very good indication that AI is the direction that the people in charge want TV and movies to go. Anything to avoid paying people.
That's not really what I want to talk about. It's important, but it's not what I want to talk about.
On October 6th, 2017, Bennett Foddy released the indie game Getting Over It. It's a meditation on difficulty, failure, game mechanics vs physical reality, and the nature of art in the internet age. It got rave reviews when it first came out. Since then, there's been an increasing number of people who see it as self-important and pretentious. So it goes.
Bennett Foddy built Getting Over It out of recycled assets, the kind you can buy in the Unity store. He was making a point. My first game, which I never released because it didn't really work, was also built out of recycled assets. I wasn't making a point. Bennett Foddy believes that so-called "b-games" are created out of sheer love for the idea and act of creating them. I believe that the distance between a b-game and a AAA title isn't really that wide. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.
Let's rewind. Star Trek was the first fandom to have a distinct culture around fanfiction. Fanfiction is liminal culture by nature - taking media and twisting it, molding it, turning it into something that is almost, but not completely, totally unlike tea. You can't sell it, not without doing a Fifty Shades and changing the names. You can't monetize it without falling foul of the law. Various creators, from Anne McCaffrey to Lucasfilm, tried to limit or eliminate it, but the liminal culture doesn't depend on popularity to sustain it. Banjo-Kazooie was abandoned after Microsoft acquired Rare and then dive-bombed the franchise into the ground with a disastrous 2008 entry, Nuts & Bolts. Emulators and fanfic writers stubbornly refuse to let that be the end of the story.
Emulators ignore and skirt around copyright. Fanfic is the definition of Foddy's b-culture - built out of second-hand characters and plots and worlds, prefab parts manipulated into new forms. Is this the "ash-heap of creativity's fountain"? Or does a mega-crossover with a billion Nintendo properties have a chance at showing far more creativity and value than a subpar, high-budget, AAA video game?
Flash forward. AI art scrapes the humanity out of a thousand artists' creations. Flash backwards. Collage artist Winston Smith juxtaposes '50s advertising with the horrors of Vietnam and the atom bomb. Flash forward. Hollywood tries to train Chat GPT on countless seasons of Law & Order spinoffs. Flash backward. The sampler takes countless snippets of sound and twists them into something almost entirely new.
2013. Many of Banksy's Better Out Than In works are vandalized, defaced, or destroyed amidst criticism for being the "anarchy-lite", aesthetic version of graffiti and street art. 2015. Sara Goldschmied and Eleonora Chiari's "Where shall we go dancing tonight?" is mistaken for trash and almost thrown away at an art gallery in Italy. Counterculture is blunted by acceptance. Acceptance is undercut by janitors. So it goes.
Art is trash. Just look at the countless think pieces mislabeled as being about "modern art" - not the modern art movement, but a vague idea of "what art is like today". The sublime is only sublime if it doesn't teeter over that thin line of pretentiousness, and the box is shrinking every day. Trash is art. Camp turns from a derisive dismissal to a goal. Ironic enjoyment turns failures into legends of outsider art. In a world where low-brow is mathematically designed pop music and franchise movies and high-brow is either old classics or incomprehensible without five scholarly articles, incompetence is the only measure of sincerity. Trash-art - poorly mixed albums with five people listening, Youtube videos too poorly mic-ed to get sponsored, fanart and fanfiction, the rare glimpse of "true kvlt" or "ulta-indie" - embraces the one thing any creative knows: that you will always look back and see your mistakes. When humans create art, we seek perfection even knowing we will never reach it. We can only improve, in the positive, negative, and value-neutral sense.
But this isn't about improvement or art. This is about recycled culture. Well, why do we recycle? We only create out of inspiration and influence. Noise rock can be traced back, however vaguely, to the blues. Movies come from the ancient urge to embellish storytelling with acting. We don't create, we reorganize. Everything comes from somewhere. Good writers borrow, great writers steal.
Chat GPT and AI art are imperfect now, but the unspoken rule of technology is that one day the code will be perfected. It cannot be criticized, weighed, debated, or reevaluated. It cannot create: it is a sum of creations, not a continuation of the human cultural conversation. Is there an inherent value to art, or trash, or trash-art? Only if we value humans - human creation, human perception, human victories and failures. Trash regurgitates. Art creates. Trash-art embraces the line between the two while never giving into stagnation.
The Boy Bands Have Won, and All the Copyists and the Tribute Bands and the TV Talent Show Producers Have Won, If We Allow Our Culture to Be Shaped by Mimicry, Whether from Lack of Ideas or from Exaggerated Respect. You Should Never Try to Freeze Culture. What You Can Do Is Recycle That Culture. Take Your Older Brother's Hand-Me-Down Jacket and Re-Style It, Re-Fashion It to the Point Where It Becomes Your Own. But Don't Just Regurgitate Creative History, or Hold Art and Music and Literature as Fixed, Untouchable and Kept Under Glass. The People Who Try to 'Guard' Any Particular Form of Music Are, Like the Copyists and Manufactured Bands, Doing It the Worst Disservice, Because the Only Thing That You Can Do to Music That Will Damage It Is Not Change It, Not Make It Your Own. Because Then It Dies, Then It's Over, Then It's Done, and the Boy Bands Have Won
Chumbawamba, album title
