NYT Tackles the Creative Economy

This article was sent to me by my friend Jack, with the promise that it was worth its reading time. It's a good look at the creative culture of today, examining income statistics and sales rates to determine if the outlook is bleak or bright for people who create and produce art and entertainment for a living.

Illustration by Andrew Rae

The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn't, by Steven Johnson

The answer, of course, is complicated. My TL;DR synopsis is that technology and the internet have made it both easier and harder for creatives. Yay! Sort of.

But two things give me heart: firstly, the fact that, even in the digital age, consumers still appreciate and seek out handmade things and tactile, real-world experiences. As James Gurney said, "Other humans will always enjoy works that are filtered through the human consciousness and the human hand." And secondly, Johnson's observation that "The profound change lies at the boundaries of professionalism. It has never been easier to start making money from creative work, for your passion to undertake that critical leap from pure hobby to part-time income source." 

Whatever the outcome, I believe that easier and more affordable avenues that pave the way for more creative people to do what they love will never be a bad thing.

© Gina Florio 2015

Real-Time Facial Projections

OMOTE / REAL-TIME FACE TRACKING & PROJECTION MAPPING from something wonderful on Vimeo.

I don't think there's any better way to say this than: this shit be cray.

© Gina Florio 2014

TED Talk - Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK

Some time ago, I wrote a blog post about how increasing technological automation will affect the future of the art industry, and the future of society in general. It was mainly inspired by a post on the same subject from the Muddy Colors blog.

Today I came across a new TED video that poses the same question, and seems to have an answer for it as well.

"As much as 80% of people hate their job... that's 4 out of 5 spending most of their useful lifetime doing something they don't particularly enjoy." [...] "We are in a kind of work paradox. Because we work long and hard hours on jobs we hate to buy things we don't need to impress people we don't like."

This reminded me of an article I read recently, Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed:

"We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing... The 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work."

Many people might think this all smacks of conspiracy theories and lofty ideals not grounded in reality, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree. And I'll reiterate that I count myself as one of the lucky few people who enjoys my job, or at least the creative aspects of it. But, as people do, I often find myself dreaming of the things I could do if my life were free to pursue what I wanted. The article continues -

"I’ve only been back at work for a few days, but already I’m noticing that the more wholesome activities are quickly dropping out of my life: walking, exercising, reading, meditating, and extra writing. The one conspicuous similarity between these activities is that they cost little or no money, but they take time."

I think I could safely call myself addicted to learning. Obviously I'm passionate about art, learning to draw and paint - but there's so much more I'd like to achieve with my life. I'd love to learn to play an instrument, or two or three. I'd love to learn several languages. There are so many books I want to read. I want to learn to sew and make my own clothes. I'd love to really get to know food... grow my own fruits and vegetables, bake fresh bread, create great meals. Animation. Photography. Sculpting. Woodworking. Archery. But I know I'll never truly have the time to learn any of those things to the extent and level that I'd like.

Federico Pistono makes the transition to a fully automated society sound very simple in his TED Talk - and perhaps it COULD be that simple - if only all of society hopped on board at the same time. However, I doubt it will be the case, for the simple reason that money exists. Not only does it exist - our entire society is based on it. Speaking generally, people love free time - but they love money more. I feel like one of the only people I know who have realized that time is infinitely more valuable than money.

Watching that TED Talk actually made me sad - because I had the crushing realization that I don't think this will happen in our lifetime. I think the people in power will fight tooth and nail to keep our society based on money. Full automation probably won't happen for 100 years or more. And I'll probably never be a crackshot with a bow and arrow. But, I suppose worse things have happened.

© Gina Florio 2013

The Reward

I know I said I'll post a big sketchdump... and I will. But for the moment I'm back to work full time and my weekends are crazy which leaves very little time for blogging (and artmaking :( but I'm still doing my best to make time).

In the meantime, one thing I CAN do during lunch at work is write short blog posts about awesome things I find on the internet. And this is the awesomeist thing I have seen in a while. It's an 8-minute thesis film called "The Reward", co-directed by Mikkel Mainz Elkjær and Kenneth Ladekjær at The Animation Workshop in Denmark, and that's all I'll say. Don't think. Just watch.

A bunch of the other art blogs that I follow have already posted about this (Muddy Colors - Lines and Colors - Cartoon Brew), which leaves me very little to do except have my voice join the chorus of praises for this great little film. I love the fact that it's wordless and thus able to be universally understood, I love the tongue-in-cheek tone (which is established within the first 60 seconds), and I love the "moral of the story" which is something I try to remind myself every day: The journey is its own reward. This relates to art education as well as life itself... the process of becoming a better, more complete artist/person is the true reward, as opposed to any particular goal or destination that you have in mind (making x amount of money... becoming famous... winning a certain art contest... getting a certain job). At the end of the day, outside forces are going to influence your life and either allow you to or prevent you from achieving those things... but only YOU have the power to determine your own attitude about how you live the life you have. If, despite everything, you work hard to improve yourself as an artist or grow as a person, then you've already succeeded. Put more succinctly: "Success is not a place at which one arrives but rather the spirit with which one undertakes and continues the journey.” - Alex Noble.

 Some extra links:

Website for The Reward, with LOTS of great concept art etc. (some posted below)
The Animation Workshop website.
Other Animation Workshop shorts.
Mikkel Mainz Elkjær's blog.
Kenneth Ladekjær's blog, on which he reveals they're making an indie game based on the film!

Here's a making-of video:

After watching this, two thoughts - (a) JEEEEEZ do I have a long way to go/a lot to learn about, (b) another great example of 2D animation meeting 3D technology!! I'll admit, as passionate as I am about animation, I'm still so uneducated about the way it works that I had no idea that this film used 3D modeling and animation.

Some backgrounds, character turnarounds and color scripts from the film's website:

The Future of Art and Entertainment - Part 3

In my last two posts I looked at the future of entertainment technology in creating an immersive experience, the kind of art that that movement has been producing, and what it all means for us as a culture.

Today I want to talk about a different kind of technology that I see being talked about more and more - automated "art" programs or machines. At the bottom level of this totem pole is Photoshop's gallery of "paint" filters.

These are pretty nice - but the effect is very evenly distributed and, at least to me, it's still clear that it comes from a photograph. However - there are more sophistocated programs being developed lately.

Artist James Gurney wrote a recent blog post about an Image Parsing program written by Kun Zeng, Mingtian Zhao, Caiming Xiong, Song-Chun Zhu from Lotus Hill Institute and University of California, Los Angeles. The goal for the software was to interpret photographs in painterly terms.

The program "intelligently" interprets a photograph and can recognize areas of interest such as people, faces, animals, and certain objects. It paints those in detail and relegates other areas of the picture to more artistic, painterly, abstract terms. It uses as many as 700 different brushes with varying factors for each stroke, such as brush size, length of stroke, opacity, and color.

Eric Fortune on the Muddy Colors blog also recently wrote a post that I'd like to sort of channel here today. (Read the entire post here, it's worth it.) He started by posting the following video.

Gurney linked to the Vangobot video as well, and had this to say. "What does this mean for traditional painters? Should we welcome it or be worried? If [the image parsing] software is hooked up to a Vangobot, anyone could buy a really nice wedding portrait painted in oil from a decent wedding photo."

Fortune said he doesn't feel threatened by this technology in its current state - but he knows technology like this is only going to continue to improve. Gurney said the same - "Will computers ever achieve the higher level judgments, what Harding referred to as 'selection, arrangement, sentiment, and beauty?' I would be inclined to say yes, yes, yes, and yes. Computers will learn to caricature and they'll do a good job at it. They will learn to paint science fiction and fantasy, and to do Van Gogh or Picasso transformations. Anything that can be deconstructed can be programmed."

However, he goes on to say that "I do believe that there is something elusive, some element of real genius in great artists that will always stay beyond the reach of materialistic or deconstructive analysis... I can take comfort in the faith that other humans will always enjoy works that are filtered through the human consciousness and the human hand." He also says that the program is a work of art in and of itself that should be applauded, and that "The more these computers advance, the better we understand what we do as painters." All of which I agree with.

Fortune has a different take. He sees this technology changing the art industry for good, and not necessarily for the better. "[It will cost] a fraction of the cost required to hire an artist for the job.  Even if the Art Director loves you, what if the publishing company has to do what it can to cut corners and save money.  It's bad enough the field is as competitive as it is already... We're all artists here. And in order for us to make a living, other people have to buy our products and pay for our services."

Then he goes on to explain technology (in general)'s exponentially advancing rate of intelligence and automation and exponentially decreasing cost. In a phrase: automated technology is getting better across the board, in every field - transportation, medicine, scientific research, athletics, music. And at the same time, it's getting cheaper, so that it can be implemented more widely for less. This technology is destroying certain jobs, but it's also creating jobs. But, at some point, it's going to start destroying more jobs than it is creating. We can't just all leave our jobs and go be software programmers.

"We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come--namely, technological unemployment.  This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour."  ~John Maynard Keynes 

Fortune concludes by saying, "...At what point of amazingly high productivity and perhaps increasing unemployment is a major conversation going to be had about our relationship to our "jobs"[?] If automation ends up doing most of what people used to do, should we continue to force people to try and find jobs and work eight hour days and more to survive? Without jobs, who's going to buy all of the things that the robots are producing?" He cites many others who are beginning to predict that, in the future, the notion of "having a job" will become obsolete.

Arthur C. Clarke had a similar notion - "The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play."

As far as I can tell, most of the people I personally know do enjoy their jobs, at least to a degree. However, I feel like we live in a world where most people are unhappy at work and dream about doing other things with their lives. But here we arrive at a discussion of almost philosophical proportions - what should life be? If no one is working - what are they spending all of their time doing? Whatever they love? Are so many things being created "for the joy of it" that there becomes an overabundance of amateur art, novels, films? What about education? Is this a society without any form of payment? When you take money out of the equation, it changes the entire structure of our civilization.

I'll end with a story that I found on reddit a while ago which really stuck with me.

A vacationing American businessman standing on the pier of a quaint coastal fishing village in southern Mexico watched as a small boat with just one young Mexican fisherman pulled into the dock. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. Enjoying the warmth of the early afternoon sun, the American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish. 

"How long did it take you to catch them?" the American casually asked.

"Oh, a few hours," the Mexican fisherman replied. 

"Why don't you stay out longer and catch more fish?" the American businessman then asked. 

The Mexican warmly replied, "With this I have more than enough to meet my family's needs."

The businessman then became serious, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?"

Responding with a smile, the Mexican fisherman answered, "I sleep late, play with my children, watch ball games, and take siesta with my wife. Sometimes in the evenings I take a stroll into the village to see my friends, play the guitar, sing a few songs..." 

The American businessman impatiently interrupted, "Look, I have an MBA from Harvard, and I can help you to be more profitable. You can start by fishing several hours longer every day. You can then sell the extra fish you catch. With the extra money, you can buy a bigger boat. With the additional income that larger boat will bring, before long you can buy a second boat, then a third one, and so on, until you have an entire fleet of fishing boats." 

Proud of his own sharp thinking, he excitedly elaborated a grand scheme which could bring even bigger profits, "Then, instead of selling your catch to a middleman you'll be able to sell your fish directly to the processor, or even open your own cannery. Eventually, you could control the product, processing and distribution. You could leave this tiny coastal village and move to Mexico City, or possibly even Los Angeles or New York City, where you could even further expand your enterprise."

Having never thought of such things, the Mexican fisherman asked, "But how long will all this take?"

After a rapid mental calculation, the Harvard MBA pronounced, "Probably about 15-20 years, maybe less if you work really hard." 

"And then what, señor?" asked the fisherman.

"Why," answered the businessman, "When the time is right, you would sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions."

"Millions? Really? What would I do with it all?" asked the young fisherman in disbelief. 

"Why, that's the best part!" the businessman cried. "Then you could happily retire with all the money you've made. You could move to a quaint coastal fishing village where you could sleep late, play with your grandchildren, watch ball games, and take siesta with your wife. You could stroll to the village in the evenings where you could play the guitar and sing with your friends all you want."

-----------------

That's all I got. Thanks for letting me pretend I'm actually a real blogger for a few days. I'm happy to report that I have been keeping up with the daily sketches (1 month down!) and I will post them all here as soon as I can. Until then, have a great weekend.

The Future of Art and Entertainment - Part 2

In "Part 1" I talked about how a new virtual reality technology could potentially change the way we experience videogames, film, and "online" activities such as shopping or talking with friends. I think this current drive towards ever more "3D" and "immersive" and "real" entertainment experiences is the symptom of a cultural desire to blur the line between the tangibility of everyday life and the excitement and wonder of our digital lives.

In "Part 3" I'll talk about how this ever-increasing technology relates to art production - but today I thought I'd just share a few examples of art that blurs the line between 2D and 3D in really interesting ways.

3D movies are obviously big right now, but they've been around for a while. I remember going to see the 3D Muppet movie in Disneyworld when I was 5 years old.

"Did someone say cheap 3-D tricks?"

In actuality, 3D movies have existed for almost as long as film itself - the first 3D projection system and viewing mechanism was patented in the late 1890s by British film pioneer William Friese-Greene, and the first 3D camera rig was patented in 1900 by Frederic Eugene Ives. The trend was actually very popular in the early 1950s, and then enjoyed a revival in the 80's and 90's (mostly as an amusement park gimmick) before growing into the big-budget filmmaking technique we are enjoying (or not, depending on your point of view) at the moment. We can buy our own home 3D televisions, sports games and concerts are broadcast in 3D, and filmmakers like Peter Jackson and James Cameron are reportedly never going back to 2D, touting it as "the way forward for film."

For me, working within the tv/film industry, it's cool to hate on 3D as a gimmick used mainly to drive up prices. Generally, if a movie is available in both 2D and 3D, I'll see the 2D version. But in my personal opinion, 3D looks best in animated films. I remember the first really great 3D experience I had was going to see the movie Coraline in 2009.

At one point early on in the movie, Coraline finds a secret passageway to a parallel universe. As she peeks into the hole, that tunnel (pictured above) expands out in front of her, away from the audience, into the distance. I remember gasping out loud when I saw it. It looked like I could walk right into it.

The other really great 3D experience I've had was seeing one of my favorite films, How To Train Your Dragon, in IMAX 3D. The flight sequences were absolutely unreal.

3D film has become almost the norm now. And a new trend is just starting - with December's release of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, we've seen the debut of Peter Jackson's now-infamous 48-frame-per-second high frame rate which critics have derided as looking "sped up" at best, and some combination of a soap opera and a videogame at worst. But the main argument FOR this technology is that it looks more "real" - that it's like you're looking through a window at the scene.

Jackson says: "As a filmmaker, I try to make my movies immersive. I want to draw the audience out of their seats, and pull them into the adventure. We live in a rapidly advancing digital age. Technology is being continually developed that can enhance and enrich the cinema-going experience. High Frame Rate shooting for a mainstream feature film has only become viable in the last year or two, and yet we live in an age of increasing home entertainment. I started shooting The Hobbit films in HFR because I wanted film audiences to experience just how remarkably immersive the theatrical cinema experience can be."

This speaks to the main point that I'm getting at here, which is that the 3D drive in film, the increasing realism of videogame graphics, and the creation of the Oculus device I talked about in my last post are all symptoms of our desire as a culture - and probably, species - to be able to step into another world, to be transported out of the drudgery of our daily lives. We want to be able to live out our dreams and fantasies as if they were real. And our technology is getting closer to doing that every day.

Three-dimensionality and realism is a coveted quality in art as well. In my first art class, VisComm 1, we were taught to approach any object with its full form in mind, drawing "through" the shapes to create a sketch with weight and substance. Now I'm taking Perspective, which is completely based on how we see the world in three dimensions, with vanishing points, horizon lines, foreshortening of planes. Having a drawing look "flat" or "un-lifelike" means you've failed. It takes a rudimentary understanding of geometry and physics to make a sketch look "right."

Recently there's been a bit of a blowback to the 3D movement, at least as far as film goes - people have nostalgia for the days when films weren't so tricked out with flashy upgrades and, in animation, the golden era of traditionally hand-drawn Disney films, before Pixar came along and changed the game with CG animation. A few things I've seen lately have attempted to bring the two together in a way that appeals to everyone. The most obvious example of this is Disney's short film Paperman, which I wrote about back in October, and which was actually just posted online in full a few days ago.

A similar-looking technology is being used in a new videogame called Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, developed by LEVEL-5 in collaboration with Studio Ghibli, the film company of the legendary director Hayao Miyazaki. The game looks like his gorgeous trademark 2D anime films - yet the characters and objects operate in three-dimensional space.

(I couldn't find a great gameplay demo video on youtube, but this one on Amazon gives you an idea of how it looks while playing.)

This last example isn't experienced through a screen - an artist called Shintaro Ohata is both a painter and a sculptor, and presents both as part of a whole piece, the sculpture being an extension of the painting and vice versa. His own website says: "He is known for his characteristic style; placing sculptures in front of paintings, and shows them as one work, a combination of 2-D and 3-D world."

I think all this experimenting, this merging of 2D and 3D worlds is a good thing. I personally love what's come from it so far. And I'm excited to see where we go from here.

(Part 3 will be the last in this series and then we can return to our regularly scheduled programming. I'll post a big old sketchdump this weekend.)

The Future of Art and Entertainment - Part 1

This video is long, basically uncut footage, and the good moments are kind of few and far between... but it's worth watching anyway.

I tell people I'm a gamer all the time and I think of myself in that way - but I've started to realize that in reality, I'm not REALLY a huge gamer. I love videogames. I'm not just saying that just because I think it makes me cool to like them. I actually love videogames in that uncool nerdy way where I can just lose myself in them. I think if I had no self restraint whatsoever I would spend my entire waking life playing videogames. But luckily I'm an adult and I DO have self restraint and playing for longer than an hour now makes me feel guilty. So I'm not really a gamer in that it now takes me about 6 months to finish a videogame. 

All that said - I enjoy games for many reasons - specifically, their ability to transport you to a different world, like a book or film, but UNLIKE books or films, you actually have control in those worlds. You literally get to take control of someone (or something) else and walk them through a story. I love the stretching of the format that's gone on recently, especially with the advent of the indie game movement (See: Portal, Braid, Fez, Limbo...) And I love that, now more than ever, there's more emphasis on the quality of the story and the character development. There's a lot of good things happening in that industry right now. (Not least of which is my little brother being accepted into RIT to study videogame development. Go Jesse!!)

So my initial reaction to this video was excitement. This technology is supposed to become available to consumers next holiday season. If it's as amazing as these reviewers say it is, I see this becoming a widespread gaming norm. (And potentially not just for gaming either - but we'll get to that.) I mean, this is what everyone wants, right? The experience of being IN it. The reviewer's reactions in the video (pointing upwards at the "snow" only they can see, freaking out when an NPC character "walks right by them") reminds me of that story about the Lumière brothers, back in 1895, showing a group of carnival-goers their very first film - "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat."

When they showed that to an audience of 19th-century people who had never seen a film before, everyone in the theater (apparently) ducked when the train rushed out of the frame. So that's what this new technology would be like for people. I would even say that the entire advent of 3D technology in film is related to this endeavor - people are trying to make entertainment an ever more immersive experience. And consumers want that. They want to be IN it.

My other reaction was... I guess I would say fear? Or at least trepidation about what this means.

Last summer I read a book called "Ready Player One," by Ernest Cline. It was my favorite book I'd read since Harry Potter (apparently I didn't think I was branding myself as enough of a nerd so I'm gonna go ahead and drop that sentence on you). I don't want to spoil anything for anyone, but I'll give you the basic premise - it's set in the future when a technology called the Oasis has become more or less the next internet. It's a virtual reality that people plug into (very much like the Oculus in the above video) and see/experience - everything from shopping, to school, to videogames is done in this giant virtual world. It's so immersive - not to mention addicting - that most of the world's population now spends most of their time in this simulation. And not to sound like a conspiracy theorist or anything, but I can see that happening with this technology.

Maybe not. After all, videogames already exist and are wildly addictive - MMORPGs like World of Warcraft already claim many lives - yet they're still more or less a niche market! That's why consoles like the Wii exist in the first place - to get the average family interested in gaming. But I also think that technology like this has many applications outside of videogames for the average user. (Virtual shopping. Virtual redecoration of your home. Virtual hanging out with friends. Virtual dates. Virtual sex? Some of these things are already happening in WoW or Second Life.)

But also, maybe so. Near the end of the video, the person holding the camera says "this is a digital drug." My favorite part of Ready Player One was actually the end. ---SPOILER ALERT!!!!--- The main character was a teenager who was addicted to the Oasis. But at the end, when he meets the technology's creator, the guy says "I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn’t know how to connect with the people there. I was afraid, for all of my life. Right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real." And I think that's such an important lesson to learn - but ideally sometime before you're dying. I learned it when I was about 22. I finally bought and installed WoW on my computer - only to uninstall it 3 months later when I realized I was running around doing errands for NPCs in a virtual world when I could be spending time with friends or creating stuff. But had I grown up playing WoW and never learned social skills? I'd probably be playing it right now instead of being gainfully employed, trying to learn to draw, having an active social life, and keeping up a blog.

What does any of this have to do with art? Part 2 of this post will be much more art-centric. But also, I think it's important to note that all kinds of art are related (and videogames are an art form, no matter what Roger Ebert thinks). Painting and sculpture, fine art and comics and concept art, books, television, film and videogames - they're all threads in the huge woven basket of culture, and anything that affects one will affect another.