Can transcending the tangible take us to creative highs?
The theme for the Johannesburg leg of 2018’s La Nuit des Idées (an initiative of the Institut Francais that takes place annually in 80 cities) was presented as a question: “Do new technologies mean new creativity?”
The crowd that gathered at the Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct in Braamfontein, Johannesburg on Wednesday probably left the event with more questions than answers — but perhaps that is an appropriate feeling for a “Night of Ideas”.
The evening began with an opportunity to sample some tech-oriented audiovisual creative projects, from Banele Khoza’s digital drawings to digitised recordings of the Rivonia Trial.
The main drawcard for most participants, however, was the opportunity to don some virtual reality headgear and explore a parallel world, whether that was Mozart’s Coronation Mass performed in the Saint-Omer Cathedral or a disturbing game in which the viewer must try to avoid a knife-wielding assailant.
It can be very entertaining watching a roomful of people separately immersed in their own virtual universes.
The deeper the immersion, the greater the comic potential.
Shouted interjections, gesticulation and mouths agape in response to subjective experiences are at odds with the objective, external view: men and women decked out for a cocktail party with frog masks over their eyes, like freedivers without snorkels.
Sometimes the comedy veers towards slapstick — I was so enthralled by Mozart that I fell over a chair.
This disjunction between the material world and the virtual one is a cause for great concern among those who are fearful of the negative consequences of technology.
We become disconnected from each other, so the argument goes; we avoid human interaction and bypass social and political realities because we prefer the versions of life that are presented to us on screen. We become too dependent on machines. We lose our authenticity, our sense of self, our creativity.
Setting aside the fact that much creative work attempts to escape “the real” — that it has to do with deceit, of ourselves and others, as well as with honesty — it is also worth asking on what grounds we assume a neat distinction between human beings and machines. When a person puts on a virtual reality mask, it’s clear where the person ends
and the machine begins. But what about artificial intelligence? If machines start to act, talk, think and create like humans … will we recognise them as human?
Anxieties over artificial intelligence were raised by a question from the floor during the discussion that was the
main focus of the Night of Ideas. Most of the panellists seemed to accept that creativity is still directly connected to our idea of “the human”. Khoza affirmed that artistic diversity is purely a consequence of different lives: the life experience of the artist remains at the core of creation.
Tegan Bristow, an artist and
academic who has done some pioneering work in exploring the relationship between culture and technology, reassured the audience that, for now at least, artificial intelligence is a means by which humans are able to interpret all the data we produce. But she also noted that the assumed binary of “man and his tools” emerged from a very particular (western and colonial) historical moment.
And she warned that, from an Africanist perspective, there is a risk that the production and consumption of technology may in fact follow a neocolonial model.
Another question put to the panel emphasised the problematic role of Africa’s resources in global industrial and technological development.
How can we celebrate technological progress, the audience member wanted to know, when it is only made possible by conflict minerals such as coltan — vital to smartphones and other devices, but also the cause of civil war and mass displacement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)?
If we truly care about “the human”, then surely we should care about our everyday complicity in the suffering of others?
Hélène Adamo, codirector of the Mozart360 project, emphasised her desire to use virtual reality in conflict resolution. Likewise, historian Sarah Bruchhausen attested to the potential of the Rivonia recordings to facilitate reconciliation and cooperation.
But she also acknowledged the DRC controversy in dramatic terms: “Each of us who uses a smartphone has blood on our hands.”