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The Animus of Art

The Etymology of Animus

From Latin animus (“the mind, in a great variety of meanings: the rational soul in man, intellect, consciousness, will, intention, courage, spirit, sensibility, feeling, passion, pride, vehemence, wrath, etc., the breath, life, soul”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂enh₁- (“to breathe”), closely related to anima, which is a feminine form.

When Bob asked me to create my Top Ten definitions of what it means for something to be Art, I dabbled thusly:

• In order for something to be Art, it must be a vulnerable expression.
• In order for something to be Art, it must provoke a reaction.
• In order for something to be Art, it must stem from a growth mindset.
• In order for something to be Art, it must remain at the mercy of ongoing definition and judgement.
• In order for something to be Art, it must be broad enough to include, and specific enough to exclude.
• In order for something to be Art, it must be perceived.
• In order for something to be Art, it must struggle to stay dynamic, pliable, adaptive.
• In order for something to be Art, it must hold a mirror up to a subconscious need.
• In order for something to be Art, it must create a choice for the recipient.
• In order for something to be Art, it must be an imperative crash of brain and ego.

And then, in this hyperbole, I was asked to elaborate on one specific definition. I pick perception.

Perception:

• It has an anatomical / biological connotation: how a living being’s senses take in and make sense of data around it.
• It has an intellectual connotation: how data once consumed is examined and analyzed, resulting in a new data set derived from implicit learning.
• It can be synonymous for personalization: how a person experiences and chooses to engage with data in a way that is unique from the way another person chooses to engages with the same data.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? In Schrödinger’s thought experiment, we cannot know for certain if the cat is dead or alive until the moment we open the box and observe it. Perception is reality.

Regardless of the trope, we must perceive something in order for us to understand what we are, in relationship to another. Perception allows us to exist both alone and as a part of the context around us. Art in a vacuum, unobserved, unheard, unwitnessed, is the promise of a thought, a hypothetical of the artist’s conjuring. It is only when we open the box and observe, when remain present to hear it fall, do we know for certain there is Art.

My independently written, much less artful reply to the question of “What is Art?” is as follows:

In order for something to be Art, it must:

• Be imagined
• Have an audience
• Be created
• Inspire curiosity
• Be beautiful
• Be subjectively interpreted
• Be human made*
• Be considered as Art by one person
• Be polarizing
• Evoke an emotional response

For me, the defining characteristic of whether something can be considered Art is whether it evokes an emotional response. That response may be a smile, a warming, a cooling, anger, even hatred. Art has the ability to move each of us in unique ways. It can open eyes and minds. If something that someone created changes your emotional state in any way – particularly if the artist was seeking to generate that very response in the viewer – it is Art. The lines are always blurred, always subjective, and that’s a big part of what makes Art, well, Art. One person may be moved to tears by a work, while another may dismiss it outright. Experiencing Art is a wholly individual thing, nobody can do it for you, and when you encounter someone who shares your perspectives it is an immediate connection point to a relational node in our human network.

*Side note, human made is now an outdated concept for art. AI can now “dream” and then present visual representations of those “dreams.” I find the imagery quite striking, and could consider some Art. As the technology advances, humans are teaching machines how to create, and the machines are creating some very interesting results.

Remembering Westworld

I’ve always been a fan of great stories. I’d often fantasize about entering and living in the worlds portrayed by my favorite books and the sense of immersion and experience conveyed by great stories, movies, comics, and games has given me ample opportunity to explore the depths of imaginations – both of others and my own. Through these media, I’ve experienced a vast range of stories, settings, and surprises. Westworld represents the (un?)natural progression of storytelling.

The introduction of the open world concept was a watershed marker in gaming history when players were given the choice to play the scripted game narrative or to finally venture out on their own, exploring the virtual world of the game, making their own choices. Right now, this seems to be the apex of the immersive experience – the ability to participate in a given storyline or to wander off and explore one’s personal narrative. Westworld’s writers expertly blend storytelling’s narrative elements with game mechanics in a hauntingly familiar and compelling way.

Great storytellers are also visionaries and all it takes is just one person to fall in love with the story so much that they strive to make it a reality. What Trekkie hasn’t dreamed of life aboard a starship? What Star Wars fan hasn’t tried to use The Force, even in jest? What fan of superheroes hasn’t envisioned having super powers? How many of today’s advances were first expressed in the tales of days past?

Stories have a way of foretelling and a select few have shaped my life paths. TRON and The Last Starfighter blended video games with revolutionary visual effects of their times, which helped propel me into a computer graphics career. William Gibson’s Hugo Award winning Neuromancer was the quintessential cyberpunk tale about hacker console jockeys, street samurai, and birthed the term cyberspace – inspiring me to explore the online world long before the internet became commonplace. Avatar breathtakingly showcased telepresence and advanced biomechanics, showing that anything that can be imagined can be made real on the big screen. And now, with photorealistic virtual reality finally approaching mass adoption, a new wave of experiences will soon be upon us. As such, I have been learning the technologies and tools necessary to be well positioned when that wave crests.

At some point in the future, sooner I’d wager than many believe, we will have the opportunity to go to parks like Westworld. As technology continues to advance at an exponential rate, people will soon have the ability to experience their every curiosity, dream, and desire first hand in a virtual world. It is going to happen, it is just a matter of time. And, as studies on active visualization have shown, the brain cannot tell the difference between a visualized event and one that happens in reality. Emphasis will shift from the technologists to the creatives, the designers.

Imagine what that means… 🙂

Read Christine’s Take on Westworld here.

Remembering Westworld

The HBO creators describe the show Westworld as “… a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the evolution of sin. Set at the intersection of the near future and the reimagined past, it explores a world in which every human appetite, no matter how noble or depraved, can be indulged.” Hmm. Clearly, I need to get out more.

Each week’s story focuses on a growing self-awareness within the show’s robotic “hosts” and how their “artificial consciousness” drive some of them to slowly deviate from their scripted loops into independent exploration. The experience in the WestWorld park for the human guests is dynamic and exciting enough that many are unaware of the growing imperative of their hosts….which creates the perfect recipe for delicious tension and fear.

Each day, as the robotic hosts are damaged or killed within their prescribed storylines, they are brought back to the lab, physically rebuilt, mental and emotional pathways erased and reset, and put back into service in the park, year after year. The show’s writers cleverly leverage the use of memory fragments or flashbacks to enable select hosts to slowly begin to realize that there might just be more to their lives than their current script.

As viewers, we learn the backstories and nuances of the hosts’ personalities through these fleeting memory-based story lines – showing the host in their originally developed story lines as well as in currently adapted story lines, suddenly flashing us back and then returning to present several times in one episode. Vox entertainment reviewer Todd VanDerWerff writes “ … [the show’s] clever use of mixed, interlocking timelines, which nicely replicated how a Host could become effectively unmoored in time, trapped in their memories and reliving moments from their past, it was able to cover over three decades of the park’s history, all the better to underline how terrible existence was for the Hosts.” I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that we all were rooting for the hosts to kick some human ass at the end of Season One.

But for one robotic host, Dolores, the frequent transition from present to some flickering memory and back again creates for her a human-like dissonance and a confusing and terrifying feeling of being “unmoored” in her growing sentience. Many times she asks others in the scene if they are real, if she has gone mad. Even emboldened, she is clearly adrift in unfamiliar territory.

Perhaps these HBO writers are just the good students of every exceptional, haunted, broken, lost, bold, scared writer of our past. Perhaps this experience of being “unmoored” from what we perceive as “reality,” this perceived madness, is in fact a primary way for us to develop a more sophisticated sense of self awareness.

Perhaps it is through a growing sense of discordance with the anchors of normative reality, challenging the linear nature of traditional learning, thinking of growth, like in WestWorld, not as a climb up a self-actualized pyramid, but as a circuitous, mad journey towards the center of a hidden, obscured maze, that begins to finally create in some of us a sense of real consciousness.

If only we are brave enough to remember.

“..the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…” – Jack Kerouac