[slide show]

Technology and the Future of Beauty

By Crispin Sartwell

A hundred years ago, George Santayana defined beauty as "objectified pleasure." His idea was that when you experienced pleasure in looking at something or listening to it, you attributed the state of pleasure to the thing that caused it rather than to yourself. That is an odd idea because it makes it seem as though sunsets and Leonardos are having a good time as they hang there being beautiful. That's a problem. But another problem comes in associating beauty with pleasure at all..

To give you a sense of what I mean, let's briefly develop a contrast between two painters: Claude Monet and Charles Sheeler. If in your head you can recover Water Lilies [slide 1] from the McDonalds and the Holiday Inns, you will remember that it's ravishing in its own way. It is above all dedicated to capturing and providing a pleasure in mere seeing: that is what governs the selection of the motif, the technique by which that motif is presented; visual pleasure, much more than lilies, is Monet's theme. That's why it's in McDonald's: even now that it's mutated into a kind of wallpaper, been trivialized by sheer repetition, it yields a slight but simple delight. If Monet is despised by folks like me and maybe you, it's not only that we have come to mistrust purely visual effects, or the fuzzy, sentimental, Laura-Ashley brand of pleasure he provides; it has something to do with the banality of pleasure itself. Perhaps we're too suspicious now for Monet's sensibility to seem plausible.

Contemplate by way of contrast this image by the American painter and photographer Charles Sheeler [slide 2]. It displays great clarity, both of vision and of mind. It doesn't screw around with little daubs of pink but boldly delineates bold forms. Maybe you're going to disagree with me on this, but I think this is a beautiful and macho painting. And this painting illustrates the reason I want to detach beauty from pleasure: I've got no doubt that most folks get more pleasure from the Monet. In some ways the Sheeler is weird, disturbing, or even inhuman. It seems emotionless, for one thing, in a way no one would accuse Monet of being; one feels the artist almost to be a machine of the sort he is depicting.

And if you don't think the Sheeler is beautiful, I'm betting that one reason is its subject: a big machine: to be precise, a steam turbine. And I do know what you mean: the thing is pretty ugly in a way. I doubt that, had I just walked into the plant where this turbine was located, I would experience it as particularly beautiful. It might even have struck me as hideous. But the turbine--or at any rate its structure, its configuration, its visual aspect--is redeemed after a fashion by Sheeler's painting. Sheeler redeemed all sorts of things this way: giant propellers [slide 3], power lines [slide 4], trains and tracks [slide 5] and industrial parks [slide 6], ducts [slide 7]. He was enraptured in an almost religious way by what I will call the "classical" machine: the mechanical/industrial colossus of the first three quarters of the twentieth century. He systematically reduces the machine to an almost abstract form (as, by an entirely different process and for an entirely different reason, did Monet with water lilies). And of course the sheer fact that he is making paintings is the ultimate abstraction: one does not have to deal with the noise such machines make or the pollution they emit when one is looking at them--miniaturized and squashed flat onto the picture-plane--in an art museum.

Despite the transformations to which art subjects machine in Sheeler's work, his paintings have made me see machines differently and think about them differently. In a way he has helped me reconcile myself to the machine: has made me see the simple and monumental beauty of a steam turbine. What is seductive or sweet about the machine is, precisely, its simplicity, even if, by the standards of human creation, the classical machine is pretty complex. But you might notice that in the works of Sheeler that I've shown you, there is hardly a single "natural" thing: not a single plant, animal, cloud, rarely even a person. All of those things, in comparison to the machine, are shaggy, messy, complicated, arbitrary. But the machine can, with some limitations, be encompassed all at once in a single visual act: it is made by people for people and has a degree of complexity apportioned to our understanding. It is precisely that quality that can make the machine landscape seem monstrous or bleak: the machine landscape is a landscape broken by human will: a will that is simplistic, paltry, and morally confused.

I work at Penn State Harrisburg, which is just a couple of miles from Three Mile Island [slide 8]. The first time I rolled to work up 441 and passed it, I was intimidated. The gigantic concrete stacks suggest an engineering project in the old Soviet bloc: the relic of a five-year plan of some two-bit American Stalin. And it feels radically dislocated from its setting. An island rendered over into concrete on a particularly lovely stretch of the Susquehanna, rising over small farms and small towns to transform the horizon, it seems to have been built on the wrong scale. But I've begun, under Sheeler's tutelage, to see that it has a certain beauty: the stacks are gigantic hourglasses that embody a bizarre sensuality, and the steam that rises from them is a weather. Sheeler detects and celebrates the disturbing loveliness of classical technology: the cleanness and clarity and simplicity that you don't find in stuff that isn't made by people. TMI is a monochrome, modernist beauty: a reduction of form to function so ruthless that the form itself is perfectly stark, absolutely purified, utterly abstract. TMI's beauty is the opposite of what we might think of as natural beauty. A bird's nest [slide 9] is a mess of twigs and string: a shaggy, chaotic interweaving of things. TMI is a hyper-simplified concrete sculpture on a scale beyond the monumental: an expression of almost perfect purity. And it is beautiful in what one might call a satanic way: beautiful as a monstrous expression of pride and desire for power: beautiful, almost, in its hatred of beauty, in its rejection of sweetness, in its insane scale. It is in its inhuman conception a completely human thing, an attempt to transform a whole region into an artifact.

The sort of aesthetic put forward by Sheeler in his art and by me just now with regard to Three Mile Island, is subversive in a number of ways to an aesthetic we might call "romantic": essentially a nineteenth-century aesthetic. It is subversive, first of all, because it dissociates beauty from nature, or perhaps even declares that the further something departs from nature the more beautiful it is. One might see such an aesthetic operating even in the world of human beauty, [slide] where makeup, clothing, plastic surgery could be conceived of as ways of transmuting the body into an artifact, making over the flesh into a machine landscape a la Sheeler: simplifying the complexity, the wrinkles, the arbitrary protuberances to make a comprehensible object of desire: humanizing the body in the way that all things are humanized: by concealing, polluting, and breaking.

But when I myself think of "beauty," I usually think of it in a romantic way: the first things that come to mind are "natural" things: trees, skies, birds, butterflies, and perhaps the female nude [slide 10]. That is a standard understanding of beauty at least since the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, especially in America. So the paradigmatically beautiful objects are natural objects, and then art that reflects such objects: landscape and some still life painting, for example [slide 11]. Well, for Sheeler, a factory is more beautiful than Yosemite. That was a radical notion in 1920, but it's a hell of a lot more interesting than another impressionist landscape.

Then, second, Sheeler's art and the cult of the machine are subversive to the idea that art and beauty are useless or above the dirty little world of commerce. Sheeler attempts to demonstrate the beauty of useful objects in a way that would have been congenial, for example, to the Bauhaus architects and the architects of what is sometimes called "high modernism" [slide 12]. Sheeler and his aesthetic pollute the notion of beauty with use, even as the machines he depicts pollute the beautiful natural landscape. There is the fearsome hint in Sheeler that what we think of as pollution might itself be a kind of monstrously beautiful humanization of the natural world.

Perhaps the nuclear power plant is the last moment of the classical machine. As I say, it deploys a Stalinist aesthetic of immensity, ideology, and stupidity. It is a machine bigger than, say, a steel mill. But at the heart of the nuclear power plant there is a mystery that is incompatible with its being a machine: the nuclear reaction itself is not "mechanical" in the sense that a steam turbine is mechanical. It is something that people set in motion, but not exactly something they make or accomplish. It has the interesting "natural" property of potentially running out of control and destroying everything, like a typhoon or an earthquake. So TMI gives us a hybrid aesthetic or is a pivot in the relation of technology and beauty: it is a classical machine with something astonishing and incomprehensible at its heart. TMI displays a sort of beauty that is past, but perhaps it also points to something about beauty's future.

Charles Sheeler was born in 1883. So he came of age through the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century. He was born only twenty years after the death of Henry David Thoreau, but the world into which he matured was not Thoreau's world. Thoreau felt the onset of industry, and sought to escape it even as it enlivened him. He always found beauty where there were no people, and regarded people themselves, or white people anyway, as a kind of pollution. He tried to hold on to, or rather to invent, a pre-industrial aesthetic. Sheeler, on the other hand, moving with a satanic American optimism, tried to make an aesthetic for the twentieth century. He tried to make us feel free in the machine landscape in which many of us seemed trapped; tried to make a beauty for industrial workers rather than farmers. Thoreau was a masochist: letting go into a oneness with nature. Sheeler was a sadist: seeing beauty in what people had seized and transformed. Thoreau dignified the idea of a natural humanity. Sheeler began to conceive and paint our future as cyborgs.

I think it is fair to say that we are at a similar moment in some ways to that moment when Sheeler turned seventeen in 1900: perhaps we are waiting for someone to show us a new beauty or to show us the beauty that is already all around us. The age of the classical machine is over: those huge industrial landscapes that Sheeler painted are mostly gone now, or are lapsing slowly back toward something we might call nature, in junk yard or dumps, or just standing there rusting. Our machines, if "machine" is still the right word, are much smaller or much bigger. Incomprehensible amounts of energy have been expended in miniaturizing the machine, so that the model device of the turn of this century is not the steam turbine, but the pentium chip. The machines we tend or work are personal computers: maybe in our cubicles, or sitting at the airport tapping at a little laptop. We are more and more constantly surrounded by little devices, the use of which quickly becomes indispensable on economic, social, and aesthetic grounds: cell phones, pagers. Recently I drove around in an Acura which showed you your exact location at all times using global positioning satellites [slide 13]. Useless, or, as it turns out, worse than useless, but fun or at least interesting.

But if the devices are tiny, the systems with which they connect us are incomprehensibly vast: if one thinks of the internet as a single machine, that machine is devouring the whole world, or covering it like a system of vines. And it is like a system of vines: in comparison to Sheeler's power lines, the internet looks like the bird's nest: what I was calling "shaggy" or what computer programmers sometimes call "fuzzy." There's nothing fuzzy about steam turbines. The more you use a personal computer, the more filled with all sorts of unique or commonplace junk the computer becomes. Really no two PCs are identical once they are in use for awhile. The mechanical model of standardized products and processes, while it has not been entirely superseded, is giving way to a kind of mimicry of organic processes in which products simply grow in all sorts of expected and unexpected directions.

That our machines have at once grown so much smaller and so much larger has utterly transformed our relation to the artifactual world, the world of human creation. Technology becomes at once infinitely more personal (compare a PC to a steel mill) and also completely out of anyone's control. The incomprehensibility of the internet, however, is not due only to its size, but also to its operation. First of all, each computer that is wired to the internet harbors a tiny version of the nuclear reaction: the mystery of the chip and the interaction of chips. Maybe you've seen the ads for Intel in which chips are portrayed as little people running around inside your PC. They're all dressed in colorful outfits that cover them from head to toe. I guess such outfits are the kind of things people wear at Intel so as not to dirty the chips, to protect them from organic human messiness. But they're also the sort of things people wear to try to clean up reactor cores after nuclear mishaps. They make a human being over into the image of new technologies: the simplified or mechanical surface harboring a mysterious substance/reaction/intelligence [slide 14].

Second, the internet is so widely dispersed, so amorphous and constantly shifting, so elusive, that I bet no one has any sort of comprehensive grasp on its configuration: I bet that no one has any sort of adequate "picture" of the internet in mind. It is a system or environment with a life of its own, constantly in the process of transformation and growth. Individual human beings like us are more or less bacteria in the body of this thing. In both these ways, technology has transcended and is transcending the classical machine. Most guys who labored in the Pittsburgh steel mills understood perfectly well how the things worked. They had a comprehensive grasp on the entire operation, which was a relatively straightforward mechanical system. Fewer people who work at TMI, I imagine, have got a grip on the whole thing, and they must all resort to metaphor to describe the reaction itself. No one can have a comprehensive grasp on the internet, and in the future technology will assume configurations that perhaps no one understands at all: there will simply be an exponentially exploding accumulation of events. Systems will in some sense be set in motion by people but they will grow on their own.

The elusiveness or even apparent conceptual impossibility of the internet is inscribed in the metaphor of "virtuality." I think the notions of virtual space, virtual reality, and so on will disappear as we get used to living inside the internet. Right now I guess the idea is that there is something false or unreal about the stuff that is on the internet, which is supposed to exist in the nowhere of "cyberspace." We are anxious still about the physical location of things, want the internet to be located in Peoria or something. Our need to find a spatial metaphor, even if we then cut it down or off with the word "virtual," shows our nostalgia for the classical machine, which certainly was spatially located in a very obvious circumscribed way. There is not anything really spatially mysterious or ontologically impossible about the internet: it is just that a web "site" is not a site like the site of a factory. Eventually we will stop calling these things sites and conceiving them as some sort of unreal sub-reality and learn to inhabit them as part of our actual world. The internet or its successors will be fully "naturalized."

And the art and industry of the computer will stand in a very different relation to "nature" than the art and industry of the classical machine age. As I say, the computerized realm in some ways approaches the condition of nature. The aesthetic of the machines Sheeler celebrated is classical: like the aesthetic of David [slide 15] or Raphael [slide 16]: straight-ahead, symmetrical, noble, simplified. The era of the post-classical machine is baroque [slides 17, 18]: a mess of lines and forms and colors too complicated to be readily grasped. But the baroque presupposes the classical: really Rubens cannot be understood unless you understand Raphael. And the era of the post-classical machine directly presupposes Sheeler's machine age: is a direct development out of it that makes use of it in a thousand ways. So if the classical machine is a journey away from nature, as Thoreau would conceive it, the post-classical machine is a continuation of that journey; and as the journey continues we get further and further away until we lose nature completely or until the conception of nature actually makes no sense at all. But it also paradoxically approaches to the condition of nature, and not just as a sim. The sim world, even a sim natural environment, is perhaps the achievement of the maximum distance from nature: moreso as the sim itself approaches perfection. But the processes by which computer systems grow approach very closely to organicity: closer as they become bigger and their components more powerful. The collapse of the virtual and actual will above all not occur as a result of perfect simulation, but as a result of ever huger accidents and bizarre turns of events no one expected, which is also the origin of what we now call nature.

Since my topic is the future I guess I'm expected to make half-baked gratuitous predictions. I am about to launch dozens, but here is the first: there will be no such thing as nature in a hundred years: we will have radically reconceived the relation of humans to the rest of the world, radically reconceived or annihilated the distinction between the natural and the artificial, between art and life. That should not surprise anyone; nature was an invention of the romantics anyway as they stared into the barrel of the classical machine.

I think you'll find that the other romantic bromide, the distinction between useful and useless, craft and art, commerce and aesthetics, will vanish as well. I really can't tell whether the internet is "useful" or not, and I don't really care. Sometimes I accomplish "practical" things on the internet, like ordering a book from amazon.com: but more likely I just wander around semi-aimlessly checking stuff out. I look at traffic patterns in D.C. just because I'm already at washingtonpost.com; I trade contentless instant messages with my daughter, who's at her Mom's house. The internet is not useful or useless: it's just there: like a forest or a mountain. There is no reason or justification for its existence, but all reasons and justifications, all commerce, will eventually flow through it. The beauty or ugliness of the internet will not be useless or useful: it will be a kind of increate, inchoate fact. This is just an extension of the reality of the computer. Computers seem useful. They "save time" and so on. But in fact no one has any more time now than they did before, and each increase in computer speed is compensated for perfectly by the increased demands of the software it runs: no gain is a gain and no efficiency is achieved; there is just an ever-ascending spiral of signal densities.

Perhaps art in the next century will amount to a kind of terror in which collaborations of unknowable numbers of people and machines will make beautiful things that no one understands. Perhaps in the next century, works of art will start making themselves and interpreting themselves to themselves. Perhaps artists will be growing works of art the way one grows a field of soybeans, hoping for the best. Perhaps the concept of art itself will become otiose or impossible in the face of the self-creating artifact. Perhaps the greatest works of art of the next century will be communicative information viruses which grow by themselves and destroy through communication all communication in diabolically beautiful ways.

The computer virus is a work of art in part because of the intensity and ingenuity of its design. It is a "modernist" work of art because it attacks and interrupts our comfortable assumptions and activities. Maybe you've heard about the sculpture designed by Richard Serra and erected in the Federal Plaza in New York. It was called "Tilted Arc" [slide 19] and consisted of a huge, curved, rusted steel wall. The point of the thing, or one point of the thing, was to make it harder for people to move from building to building. And the folks who worked there hated it and finally succeeded in having it removed. It was in their way. If you are a federal official who is idiotic enough to hire Richard Serra to make a work of art for your plaza, that's what you get: Serra wants to make it a little harder for the federal government to function; he thinks that's a legitimate function of art. So do I, come to think of it. The computer virus is like that: in a sense it's a nostalgic victory of romantic individual creativity over the non-finite silicon/electronic/organic machine. The dude who made the Melissa virus is a contemporary Toulouse-Lautrec: he named the thing after a stripper he admired, and sat in his little room all night every night working out how to transform the visible and intelligible world. But on the other hand the virus itself consists of code: it is part of the silicon/electronic/organic machine it targets. The possibility of making it or introducing it exists only in the "virtual" world it seeks to interrupt or destroy. The perfect computer virus, like the viruses that kill people, would destroy the system it fed on, thus destroying itself: the perfect work of art for the twenty-first century is the self-consuming artifact.

So let me wind up with even more gratuitous impossible predictions. The beauty of the next century will be a shaggy, pseudo-organic beauty that is silicon rather than carbon-based. The forward-thinking artist of the next century will make works too complicated to be grasped in a visual or auditory act: already we see something like that in Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim, for example [slide 21]. The machine will grow ever smaller and ever larger until we are hooked into huge communication systems all the time through tiny devices on or in our person. Institutions and governments will seek to control the net and us through processes of simplification, screening, monitoring, etc., but will find that surveillance is impossible in the beautiful mess; the whole concept of power will have to be radically reconceived as communicative and pseudo-organic rather than ideological. The classical machine will play for the twenty-first century the role that nature played for the nineteenth: it will be the object of longing and nostalgia. Already we have imitations of classic phones and blenders and cars (Beetle, Viper). We will wish for industrial production in the way that Thoreau wished for oneness with nature. The industrial worker will take on the iconographic status of the cowboy. Paintings by Charles Sheeler will appear on posters in hotel rooms. People will design useless pseudo-classical machines, or they will make post-classical processors that look like classical machines [slide 22]. Self-perpetuating and self-annihilating technologies will make art a branch of horticulture. New and inconceivable hatreds will spring up and yield beautiful things. Sex will get even stranger than it is right now and be enriched by the Pentium 8 processor. Beauty will be viral: impossibly profuse and self-replicating and arbitrary and infectious and lethal. And finally, beauty will once and for all detach itself from pleasure, so that there is no reason for anything to be beautiful or not: no goal, no justification, only an inconceivably huge communication system awash in an arbitrary syntax of electronic impulses imploding into a beautiful death, as when you look at the remanufactured corpse in the funeral home, and all you can say is: "don't he look natural?".

Crispin Sartwell