I don’t think I’m able to yet to a satisfactory job, but I’ll take a stab at a few things. The Versailles example is a new iteration of an idea that’s not so new, the idea of exploring the tension between the picture plane as a window and the image it purports to show us. When paintings like that were made it was the pinnacle of the idea that the picture plane is a window into another world. Painting has since retreated from that notion, instead embracing the fact that the picture plane is a surface covered in paint first and foremost (and then a bunch of stuff happened after that, but that’s beside the point). If we draw a parallel from painting to how virtual environments are rendered on computer screens, it seems that approaching the picture plane as a surface (both physically and theoretically) is usually unquestioned.

Another thing. I can’t remember where I read this, but someone was talking about how the internet is this really odd cultural hybrid because of the strange nature of its origin. On the one hand, it’s the product of Cold War US defense spending, it is quite literally a by-product of nuclear paranoia. On the other hand, so much of what it has become was forged by a small group of ex-hippies living near San Francisco, the very people opposing the excessive madness of nuclear paranoia. As a cultural force, the Internet is very young, and I think those influences are still very much present.

So how does that play into Art Project? Art Project is an extension of Google Maps. Google Maps is part of Google’s dreamy, utopian ambition to catalogue the world’s knowledge, but it’s also a creepy, almost Orwellian surveillance tool. Have you ever found your own house? It’s there. And anyone else can find it too, if they know where to look, and there’s a good chance that a simple Google search will tell them where to start.

What do you think ARE the implications of Google’s ‘new way of looking’? What DOES that (amazing sounding) Versailles image lead to, do you think? I realise that this is “raising questions”, but what are the questions? And what are the answers? Most people (I refer to students I’ve spoken to about this) don’t see Google Art Proj (and by extension, the internet as a whole) as having much of an agenda beyond the obvious commercial one.

So what do you think?

I’d also be interested to know what are the “most interesting things related to images and meaning happening in our time” that you suggest are not made by artists?

The set of assumptions inherent in something like Art Project is incredibly vast. I could only begin to scratch the surface. More than anything it’s an open question that I think is worth investigating. I brought it up for two reasons.

One, (and this is a huge generalization) I get the feeling that a lot of artists and a lot of people thinking about art aren’t thinking very seriously about the implications of the Internet. I think that all people, not just art people, tend to choose how seriously to take something based on whether or not it fits a certain set of prerequisites. In art this most often takes the form of only addressing something deemed to be produced by an Artist, or that is clearly a part of the narrative of art history. This is really limiting, and I think if we stick to that we’ll end up missing some of the most interesting things related to images and meaning happening in our time. In a hundred years I think people will definitely ask “What was Google? What did it want? What values guided its decisions?” In that sense Google is an author, and I think we should start asking those questions now.

Two, the tendency to take a myopic view and miss things right in front of you goes both ways. Google is doing this, too (or at least I think they are). They operate on the idea that people want to more easily see things that that are usually difficult see. So they want to show you what your hotel in London looks like before you go there, and they want to show you the inside of the Tate. But when it comes to art, the very act of looking is so incredibly loaded. Creating a new way of looking, given all the ways artists and theorists have explored this idea, is full of all sorts of interesting implications. I’m not faulting Google for not considering all this. In fact I think it’s really great that they’re doing things like this that generate questions.

I did have another experience that starts to get into this territory that I didn’t write about. When exploring Versailles I came across a trompe l’oeil painting depicting a plaza receding into space, rendered using perfect perspective. If I adjusted my position in the room just so, the perspective in the painting became indistinguishable from the perspective in the panoramic photo of the room of Versailles I was looking at on my computer screen. Where does that lead? I’m not sure, but it certainly adds a layer to the thinking about looking that has always been a part of the dialog around painting.

1.

I was careful to say that the temptation to dwell on the limits of Art Project is similar to the uncanny valley, but it’s not the same thing. I think they are both examples of a more general statement I made, “The closer a virtual experience gets to a genuine experience, its deficiencies become more apparent, not less.”

While the deficiency of one is frustrating and the other is revolting, my point is that they both capture your attention more than it seems like they should. The uncanny valley graph is useful because it shows that what “should” be a linear progression is not. And both leave an open question, why does this happen? I don’t know the answer, but I’m fascinated by the question.

For example, if I were browsing MoMA’s collection on their website, I would probably never notice that a number of works were not digitized for copyright reasons. It’s only when the experience becomes more lifelike that the deficiencies become apparent. Robots work the same way, we realize how unreal they are when they’re almost real.

Another way to put it would be that virtual people and virtual experiences both share a strange quality in that they move in two directions with a single motion. They’re progressing toward more lifelike experiences while simultaneously moving away from them. And this duality happens with a single advance, which is really weird.

I know that referencing something from robotics is a bit of a stretch, but it’s a very intentional one. I easily could have called it postmodern, or called it an example of the simulacra, but I did not want to do that. I think that using those terms can often take a discussion down a rabbit hole where a lot of readers won’t follow. It’s not that those terms are wrong, if fact they’re probably *more* accurate, but I’d rather make a horizontal move than go deeper into artspeak where less readers will follow.

Thanks
Ben