Alan Kay at Aspen Institute/Kennedy Center Arts Summit "Science and Technology as Art" (2015)
From Viewpoints Intelligent Archive
one of the cool things Alan once said was when he was at
xerox parc he was
doing the dynabook which is really the prototype for
not only laptops for the ipad you
know just but it was for individual creativity is for kid
to take in the woods almost and make something beautiful with
because he believed tools are empowering and
empowerment mean to be able to create art but
he was working at a research center owned
by xerox there's always boss one of his bosses
there i think it was said you know kept saying
well how does this really going to help us what's the
like you know give me a report on the future
and Alan's answer was the best way
to predict the future is to invent it Alan
Kay has done that thank you okay
so let me just
just get started
one more time here so
I'm
very happy to be invited here this
talk will be a little bit different it starts
in the same domain that
that
this conference has been about
but is
going to be a little bit different in the
way it approaches the
idea
is here and I'd like to dedicate this
talk to Jerome Bruner many
of you will know this name Jerry is now in
his hundredth year of advancing civilization
one of the most amazing people
we've ever met we love you Jerry and
our gardener
was a student of Jerry's as we all were in
one one way or another I like to start
off just by saying this talk is
kind of a budget of metaphors
because I'm going to have to go
from areas
that we are a little bit familiar with like this old metaphor
from actually the 19th century about human
memory which is actually
not not so far from what actually goes
on that rain comes down
hits randomly
on the ground one little place some
stuff gets moved the moving
of that stuff makes a little channel
the channel funnels the rain more
efficiently in the air and pretty soon you get one of these
and we
can wander around in it and
this pink context can
actually seem to be everything that is
in our world if we grew up in the game Grand
Canyon we might never even think to look up
it's all around and we wouldn't even
know it was pink because
as McLuhan said I don't know who discovered
water but it wasn't a fish and
so this first idea is this idea that
we are always embedded in a context
we're really aware of the
extent of the context and because of
our limitations in a variety of different
ways even the context that were embedded
in we only get to experience a little
bit of its influence at any given time
so here's an experiment
can actually do with your thumbs you don't need quarters
if you hold up one quarter or one thumb
twice as far away as the other and look
at them turns out on your retina the
one that's further away will be half the size
on your retina and Descartes actually
peel the back of an ox's I in
order to see if an a
biological lens work the
same way as a glass Walter knows all this it's
great heaven yep so and yes it does
and but in fact
that I is connected to
pachinko machine known as our brain and
those optic those signals
nerve go to a lot of different places about a dozen
different places that
brain is actually active and
the process that
it gives rise
to is
made up of two things one is our beliefs
I've colored it pink like the Grand Canyon these
are the things that we both genetically think
are true and that we culturally
think are true and those beliefs
affect what we like to call reality
but is actually a waking dream we
are in fact hallucinating all of the time
and if
you've ever tried an isolation
chamber tank in the 60s they're
coming back by the way try them
about 15 minutes in there without any ability
to detect any sensing information at all you
start hallucinating and go on the equivalent of an LSD
trip because this waking dream is
not just made up of our beliefs but it actually requires
constant reference to
the world around us in order to more or less stay on
track otherwise it starts acting like a sleeping dream
and so what happens to those two
quarters is we know those two quarters
in our two thumbs are the same size and
so we pass the information from our retina
through our beliefs and in our waking dream
the one that's half the size and
our retina comes out being about eighty percent of the size
of the one that's closer to us and
this was one you cannot shake it
is really hard to shake it you can mount the
quarters on a ruler to make everything it is really
really hard and there are dozens and dozens and dozens of
these and so basically
we cannot even see what's on our rack what that
means is that in the context of the word sanity
the best we can be is what core
zip ski termed unsane we
were always unsane and we may be worse than that
so there's one idea of the
influence of context here and McLuhan
had a great line he said in till I believe it I can't see
it this is much more the case than
the way that that line tends to go and right
outside my hotel a few days ago in New York
this happened the guy with the hammer and
as reported by the New
York Times mr. O'Grady said he looked like he
trying to get away from the officers when he
was shot I saw another mrs. calls
us said I saw a man who was handcuffed
being shot i am sorry Bea I'm crazy but that's that's
what I saw and take
a look at the upper right
hand corner
here's the guy chasing the cop with a hammer
and here's the other cop shooting
him I don't see any handcuffs
back dozens because
it was captured by a camera this
is going to lead into what science is all about
which is absolutely getting
away from what we like to think about the
world we have to use instruments to get around with what's wrong with
their brains and those instruments are not just physical
instruments but some of the instruments are
actually instruments
to help us see things that
cannot be seen so
fortunately this was all captured and
we got this perfect
record published in
The New York Times and with the video
on youtube so you can
actually check it out yourself and see that these memories
was a right after it happened we're
actually manufactured by what people believed
as you know we're here
today to honor mrs. flexer who you all know as
grade teacher she'll be here in just a
everything good
okay what does that look on her face
what
does the look she's
phi frightened out of her mind
because
that pink
world that she was in suddenly got violated
and it got violated and
that violation was detected by
a fast working system that's part of
the way our brain deals with things we
have to deal with real-time things and a good way
with real-time things with pre-stored patterns we've
got zillions of them most things we do in real time
are dealt with in a more skillful
way than a cognitive way and the transition
here was some release
from that and then
she's so happy you ever had this
happen to you so these
stage now she could have been listening to
a piece of music and had
the same reaction it's like holy shit
where am I
what's going on here well the fear
reaction not only gets adrenaline going
because you might have to run or fight but
because you might have to fight it also gets dopamine
and other neurotransmitters that are actually
opiates and so the fear reaction
actually dopes you up so you
can contend with danger
without feeling pain and
when your cognitive system
says hey there's no danger you're coked up
and all of a sudden you have this fantastic
feeling this
has been studied very carefully over the
last 20 years using PET scans
and functional MRIs and so it's a
interesting thing to think about and Daniel
Kahneman wrote the book fast thinking and slow thinking
again a metaphor here calls
the fast thinker system one and the slow thinker
system too and
just so we remember
that these are metaphors here's a book
classical book called maps of the mind and has
about 40 different theories
of mind in it not all of them incompatible
with each other and it doesn't even matter what the
theories are the important thing is to realize that no matter what
you throw at the mind there are other points
of view on it and so a system one and system two is
really a useful metaphor but
here's the cool thing about system
one and also the dangerous thing about system
one is it doesn't matter if you know you're safe
these kids
absolutely would not get on that roller coaster if they thought
there is any chance of them die but look at them
if we
were to stand next to a door and I slam the door like
this you would have this reaction even though
you know it's just me slamming a door because system
one is set up to respond among other things
too loud noises genetically it's
set up to respond to reptiles
it's hard to shake that so
one way to think about it is that system one is
fast reacting and slow to train
as anybody who's ever learned a musical instrument
knows you play a musical instrument primarily
with system one as far as all the technical stuff
goes and it takes a while to train
it and system two
is much faster at learning but it's much slower
to react because it actually has to think about
things so you can do peekaboo
over and over over again and
one one of the ways of
thinking about what the arts and the sciences are
partly about the joy there is the joy
of this kind of supply surprise
in this kind of release so
now I'm going to make the Grand
Canyon into a flat plane I'll
have an aunt thinking its way along the
end can run into a
an obstacle
i can plan its way around it can do many many
things all the trappings of thinking and it
realizes that it's only thinking pink thoughts
but the ant can wander
along or be led along it
could have a little blue thought and
what the land has learned up to this
point is critical because the
and has been to school the and has gone to
church the aunt has been indoctrinated into
the pink world chris flat that
little blue thought gets wiped out but
every once in a while you're taking a
shower you out you're in a concert
you're in some place where you're
a little bit disassociated you can get a whips
that whoops
puts you into a different
context than the one you're in i'll call this the blue context can
bit different from the one you're in could be enormously
different from the one you're in and the
basic reactions to this are the reactions
of that teacher so like
the simplest one for instance is a joke a
joke is bleeding somebody down the garden
path and then revealing it's about something else
but discovery
aha and there's in
music you have em and
I and oh and
I wanted to commute because I didn't want to try and define art here
so I'm just going to stay with these sounds these
are the sounds that people make when they're taken
out of one context and put into another and I
don't need to go any further
important thing about if you're creating
or running into one of these ideas from somebody
else is the idea might be
terrible it's independent
just because you had this epiphany doesn't
mean in fact many
people have these in the old days would start religions
because they seem to come from heaven but
in fact most ideas
to bed and I think everybody here understands why
it's just hard to have a good I idea
and another part of
this and this goes against the myth particularly
the American myth of doing everything
spontaneously is can take a long
time to have those whoops asst
can take years of
Basque round to have those whoops asst
courage who is a theatrical Critic as well
as a poet wrote in a review people
go to bad theater hoping to forget
elevision
but they got a good theater tingling
to remember and so everybody
here who has done theatre knows that what
doing is trying to set up what's called a magic
mirror in theater which is to beam the audience's
intelligence back out at them you're
trying to wake them up you can't tell
them anything like I can't tell you anything but
you to think of thoughts that might not have thought when
you walked into the room you already have them
but their masked by other things that you're doing
Paul Hindemith in a
composers world was the guy who came up with
the first time I saw this phrase in the 50s
co-creation because that's what
happening when you're listening to music is your co-creating
along with a composer and if
it's completely random you get upset if it's
completely predictable you get bored but
if the composer puts in things that you didn't
anticipate but you can instantly see that
they actually were part of this larger scheme you
get catapulted into this other world the composer is showing
you something that you didn't anticipate but
yet it fits into this thing so I think this is a good
idea this to plane model
is an idea of Arthur Koestler called
it by association he was particularly interested
in the whoops having a foot in both worlds
but I think you can see you don't have to have a foot
in both worlds you don't have to have an analogy that takes
you from one together and then of course people
Richard Feynman have pointed out for many many years
that hey these are the same
this is what scientists feel scientists
have all of these reactions and so by
any reasonable sense of things
the science and mathematics
and technology our arts like
the rest of them some of them are more recent
hey're a little bit different in a way I'm going to try and show you
but first to get away from the
words here and back to something that's a little
more sensual one of my friends is a glassblower
and we were fooling around this
is called a gather yeah it's just one of the
most beautiful things I'm he's beautiful to blow
glass but a gather and
he he held this thing up like
this and he said you know if I could I would take a
bite out of this because
he loved it and when you're in love you
want to merge with your beloved that's
another way of thinking about art this is the way scientists
think about science and
so that adds another exclamation
to all recipes
so
sensuality these
are dominant ones of touch the
earliest forms of sensing
most of
them are in the census of the Arts we know today I
apologize to the artist who
made this for only drawing on it for
a couple of seconds as an example is really
ugly to not
take the time to enjoy each
one of these here's another visual
known what was going to happen this morning I would have
done this a little bit differently but
here
we see something marvelous happening in time
visuals and music together and I'd like the sound
up quite a bit more for this next one
music doesn't actually need visuals that music
actually really was aided by British
dick off I think but
imagine now instead
of having these lights here that we're all in san
marco cathedral in venice with our eyes closed
and and we might hear something like this
you
I just
love this music from the late
16th century it's the most incredible
stuff but it's
still sensual it's invisible
Leonardo called music the science of the invisible
but it's audible but
God
Walters got all the stuff covered in his books but
here's a great story
that's Einstein at age four and
when he was recovering from
an illness he was given one of these and
here's what he said I can
still remember that this experience made a deep and lasting impression
on me something deeply hidden had
to be high be behind things and here's
the problem the problem with
what we're talking about here with science and
technology is that almost everything important about it
is not just invisible it's non central
my friend
Frank Oppenheimer many of you will have known him
in the past did this marvelous place
call the exploratorium in the exploratorium
when it originally started out had 500 exhibits
each one devoted to just one thing which is the
world as not as it seems and
the sponsors complained they said we wanted
to science museum and you made a nosh pit we're
always children running around bashing on things
and Frank said you don't understand the
Gateway to science is to
understand that the world is not as it seems in the most
profound fashion you have to start
from there because otherwise you're constantly
being distracted by how the world does see and
so these are the arts
of nonsense and the
arts of non story for the most part
their narratives about scientists
but scientific knowledge mathematical
knowledge it's really isn't in a narrative form is
actually what von Neumann call relationships about relation
chips and I'll look at that in a in
a little bit and it's not about
this this is what this form
here is made for we are around a campfire right
now and I'm using oral means
and we heard that oil
means are very important and they are they're
important for telling stories and those are I
don't want to replace those a lot
of our joy about being human beings is about
alking about I'm talking about something different
something really different it's an additive
one of the biggest additives
the human race has ever come up with and every part
of it has to be approached through this
nonsense way
of dealing with things and
here's one of my favorite so
this is back in the 18th century I have one of these
I love this this
may be its last trip because
they're made out of paper
on here
so this is
well two hundred some-odd years ago
in the late 18th century
people in coffee shops in England
and Europe had these little globes they could
take them out and they would talk about what the earth
looks like from space they knew because
when we went out there just as was
described the
most interesting thing to scientists was there
was no surprise it looked just exactly
the way Chesley bone still had
painted those pictures that looked exactly the way
the earth had been mapped out no
surprises of any kind and
the picture on the right is engineering
picture on the left is science
so
we can think of this as the birth of a baby being
able to find out things that you can't find
out by really direct means and here's a nice picture
of how India was
mapped and using
various various instruments
chronometer 'he's sextants
to find out where you are and
viata lights to measure things
and was done by piecing together evidence and
a critical idea here
is that the
we can think about what science math
and engineering are from
considering this diagram that the
content of all these areas is kind of like this it's a system
there isn't really a narrative here see it's a it's more
complicated than there there's no place to begin and end everything
is related in mathematics you
can get this point to
be in the same place because you're not reasoning
about the real world in mathematics you're only reasoning
about how relationships work with
each other abstractly in science you
can never get those points together and an
engineering you can never get those points together
for two different reasons
so you have this idea of tolerance
and yet what you get out of this
is plausibility so India
is represented here and in the maps
today is plausibly similar to
a very very high degree with what's
actually there it's not exact but it's better
than any form of falsehood from
the past and
here's one of the great books of all time most
people have never read it most people are never trained
to read it and yet it was
had as big an
impact on human thought
as anything a person could think
of you I put it in the top five every part
of this is a beautiful and yet
you have to understand some mathematics
you have to actually be willing
to plow through it take some years of preparation it
has all the trappings of what it takes to
appreciate classical music and other developed
forms and if you don't do that for
instance one way of thinking about if system one isn't
fluent with a lot of the trappings of this
stuff system to never gets a chance because there's just too
much stuff there
similarly what's interesting about magnetism isn't
what the iron filings show
or even what Faraday
and Earth's dad found
out that by putting a current through a wire a
magnetic field is somehow created that
acts as though a magnet has happened
what's interesting here is that the
only descriptions that we know of this that are any
good are in the forms of mathematics that is a
very very cold desert to
learn how to eat
because what you have to what you're envisioning
here is not anything that its physical
you're in visiting what the relationships of this
particular kind of mathematics have
so as Galileo said the language of nature is
written in mathematics and most people don't read
that language similarly in what's interesting
in molecular biology
here this is charles darwin as a younger man endless
forms most beautiful the problem is the wavelengths
of light are such that the
detail that's shown here had to be simulated
because we can't see them directly even with
at has to be found out the same way the
world was mapped and by using electron
microscopy which unfortunately kills the animals
in order to see some
of the details on them computing so
much similar to what biology
is about modern biology I wound
up getting degrees in both of them and they
parallel on them
and as beautiful as this wafer
is it has nothing to do with computing as
beautiful as silicon transistors are has nothing
to do with computing you can make computers out of rope to
make computers out of paper clips what's
really beautiful about computing is what
it can do and how it how
it actually does it abstractly so
a metaphor here is the computer is an instrument like
a musical instrument whose music is ideas
this is something that ADA when Ava said
the analytical
engine weaves algebraic patterns
the way the jacquard loom weaves
flowers and leaves she understood
what the extent because it's the projection out
of the mirror machinery that counts
so here's a an
image of four intertwined systems
that we live in because now we're getting that the one
of the lingua franca for talking about these areas
that this this session is about is
actually systems it's not really even just science
or engineering so on the on the right there
is the system of the universe nature
in the middle in
the back is our social systems on
the right hand side is our technological
system that is a self-portrait of the internet
and then there's us so we could call this
the systems that we live in and the systems
we are there is a way of thinking about
all of these ideas
and
the thing that most closely approaches this is
writing and see I would
disagree with Megan and she didn't actually make it up with
the internet is not the most important thing
it's the most
important thing since the printing press writing
is much more important than either of those but
the printing
press is a great amplifier for it and part
of it is that getting fluent getting system one again fluent
with what it means to become a reader and writer
changes us cognitively and
here's something that we did as a systems
design quite a long
time ago and it's just wonderful that
you can I've
got it here I love that you can just hold the thing up and
it's an operating system for
us you can think of it as the
tcp/ip for the human race as a
start not a perfect system but
what was interesting is not just the result
but actually how they arrived at the result
and the
Constitutional Convention by
the way recommend James Madison's notes
which of the most comprehensive notes taken
on this secret proceeding they set
hings up in really interesting ways and occasionally
with correctives to try and damp
out the natural tendencies of human beings
and they did it in a fantastic way
and it's something we should talk about because this is this
process of making progress in the face of disagreement
this is almost a lost art
Franklin as I
got this from I got this from Walters book
we are sent hither to consult not
to contend and then here's his
famous statement and
then the thing to realize is that every time we do one of these
things we were just making a new context so it's a gully and
we shouldn't act as though it's sacred and not to be
not to be changed I
time is short here
but I could could not
find a way of
not digressing for one second
and just because
that's the nature of this stuff
so I think many people
have learned about the Constitution
everything else but there are 55
they weren't all there at the same time but in any given time there
20 to 40 how
did they vet the drafts
think about it the
thing that's in the library
of congress is written by out by hand
so that they have 40 people
copying each draft no
way they type set overnight
each draft they use
the next technology the technology that they weren't
going to write the official thing in the
technology they could have actually used to
put out the thing but it just wasn't official it was too
new but in order to make
it readable they each draft and this
is a copy of the first draft of the thing was done like this with
room for making notes and cross outs and everything
else something to think about what about
technology okay so
the problem of course is us and
as I've been portraying
us we are kind of like cave people with briefcases
in our brief cases are
remnants of our hunting and gathering past a
distaste for the other in concentric
circles going out from our
siblings our family our neighborhood our
country all of these lead to rivalries
of various kinds we love revenge we
just decided to take revenge on the Boston
bomber
instead of a spear we have an atomic weapon
and the combination of these two is disastrous
we have the same old brain we have to ask what's
a better context for surely not pink
and that brain can
also think itself out of the context that it's been in
several we just haven't made it stick
with the larger population we have not been
to improve the Constitution to the extent that it needs to
be improved and we have not been able to improve our
conception and vision of what we should be thanked
thank
you very much Alan and now to
give a bit of a counterpoint
view is somebody I'm very proud to del
call professor because sarah lewis
as of july first will be the professor of
architecture and African and African American Studies at
Harvard University which he has
been a de bois scholar and
knowing about the Dubois scholars
I was particularly interested in how much
you've drawn in your book the rise which everybody should
read which is about creativity and
the foundations of creativity one of which is even failure
but how you drew from Frederick Douglass
and his connection to the beauty of art
which he fully understood which I did not know until last night
when I read your book and the connection of art
to policy technology so professor
Sarah Lewis thank you
so much Walter for that
generous introduction and I have
I felt as though i received my first test after
accepting the position to be a professor at Harvard when Damien
walsall gave me the invitation to do a response as
an art historian to a panel presentation
on technology
and hopefully I'll pass we'll
see but you know Alan gave
a beautifully wide-ranging presentation and I won't
respond to all the different points but I will
say one of his comments made me flash back to that
moment when Damien invited me when he said we are all loose
inated all the time
system one was going on in my mind when
Damien asked me to present right
but system two prevailed when I realized
that ultimately the work that I'm up to is understanding
how art is a technology for getting us to
see around our collective failures right
to come together when we
might prefer not to so
speak today is art as a technology for justice in historical
terms and I'll do
so briefly so we'll have time for a wrap-up panel
as well the walter kindly mentioned i began
this investigation when i started to look at the really improbable
foundations of iconic rises in the history
of creative endeavors i learned
some things i didn't know i learned for example that
ellington's said about his landmark music I merely
took the energy it takes to pout and I
wrote some blues I learned
that this now legendary RKO
screen test from the 1930s said about
a particular dancer can't sing can't
act balding condense
a little and this was in reference to Fred
Astaire there's so many of these stories
one of which really gripped me when I saw it
at sotheby's was that Martin Luther King received seized
in a transcript of A's and B's
during seminary right and I thought about
these improbable failures but as an art historian I
think I was most struck by learning that the start
of the communications revolution The Telegraph
you might say began with the failed pursuit
of a painter namely Samuel
Morse so as you might be able
to see from the Telegraph model the stretcher
bars of one of his failed canvases comprise the
actual frame of this device
Samuel Morse didn't just want to be a painter
he wanted to be a painter of great renowned Rembrandt
Titian as he wrote to his parents and he
felt jilted by his first love at
that altar he was unable to
support himself and his family sent his
family to live in New Haven while he struggled to make a living in
New York might sound familiar it's
a kind of timeless theme he was NYU's first
professor of painting in fact but one
day his students started to notice that batteries and wires
populated that small studio in Washington Square
as much as paint brushes and pigments
Morse didn't see any difference between
innovation with artistic means and what we might now call
technological means Morse
ffectively knew what we are holding a summit about today that
their art and Technology are inextricably bound and
as Walter Isaacson beautifully wrote
in the innovators the truest creativity of
digital age came from those who were able to connect
the arts and the sciences many
have been arguing for the needs to bring the Arts and Sciences
together but I would argue that the
urgency to do so comes from the fact that they were
once never so far apart right mae
Jemison i think puts this most beautifully
she writes explaining
she took with her on her first trip to space a
poster of a dancer and choreographer Judith
Jamison the artistic director
of Alvin Ailey until recently and a bundu statue from Sierra
Leone the creativity that allowed us to
conceive and build and launch the space
shuttle Springs on the same source as the
imagination analysis it took to carve a bundu statue
or the ingenuity to design choreograph
and stage and Alvin Ailey Dance cry
that's what we have to reconcile
in our minds how these things fit together
so
a few years back when I was curating at
the Tate Modern and then moma I created
a show kill curated a biennial that
really looked at the connection between art and technology explicitly
it was called the dissolve and I was fortunate enough
to have David Adjaye design the
space but recently I've begun to be
productively inspired by the tension
you might say between art and technology and how
it gives us an opportunity to look at the unique mechanism
of an object itself of art
itself and how it offers a sense of connectivity
when we might not otherwise come together and
how does it do this that's what I'll focus on really for the last
few minutes here but to do that I just want to
go back to San o mores for a minute this is a painting
of his from 18 22 / 23 the
House of Representatives it was a painting
that he created to offer a sense
of his excellence he wanted to receive a commission
to paint works that now still
reside in the Capitol building but John
Quincy Adams rejected him beyond hope of appeal more
sense so this is what you
might call failed painting but now I'm
going into art history class mode you
might notice it has a very odd compositional focus right
what's really at the center is
not a portrait of any of the many luminaries
that were on that floor but instead is her
pointer here hmm a man preoccupied
by currents at the center of that painting
it's unusual
really it Telegraph's where he was going to go
his own career but it also implement
eyeses the function of the Arts which
is to get us to focus with
immersive concentration to
fall into ourselves and to create a kind of private domain
the art of tech
the art as a technology offers us a way
to access this kind of interior tea and in
this sense I think back to what Thomas
he was standing in front of the painting and described
how he lost his sense of time completely in
so doing it makes me think about the
way in which jennifer roberts my new colleague at harvard
and why she asks her art historian
students to sit in front of a painting for three
hours as an exercise to
get them to consider what comes to them because our creates
a private domain in us i've
been told i need to close now okay
there's
so much to say here but these private domains are
crucial because they offer a pathway to iconic plastic
decision making right the kind that we
can't make when faced with potential collective descent
our gardener
speaks about in his book changing minds the invisible
quality of the gradual shifts in our
judgments and decisions and I think
the private domains that occur in response
to the arts is one of the ways that this takes place
think about what occurred for example with
Charles black when he went to go listen to louis armstrong
one day in 1931 the private domain that was
created in him charles block went on to become one
lawyers for Brown versus Board of Education he
says because he noticed the genius coming
out of Louis Armstrong's horn during a
period of here we go again segregation right
he knew that segregation was wrong in that moment
because of that genius and describes that his
trumpet playing let him start walking
towards justice that day
when he went on to teach at Columbia and Yale he
would hold an Armstrong listening night to remind
his colleagues and students of the private domains that
the arts can create and the technology that allows us to walk
towards justice as a result I could go
on and on but I would simply really ask how many movements
have begun when one impactful
work of art one work
of aesthetic force of any kinds indelibly change
our sense of the world think for example the
abolitionist print the slaveship brooks that
was used in parliament as evidence to
show with graphic precision the inhumanity
of slavery right to show how
734 men women and children were fit into the halls
of a ship that could hold 450 think
about as we've heard earlier the galvanizing
force of the image that we now call earth
rise from the Apollo aid and how it sparked the environmental
movement I really
want to close by reminding us
I think it's so important to honor the private domains that come
from our aesthetic force as it
relates to technology it's
because we're in a moment where we have increased access
to the arts that can offer us this
kind of impact but I wonder if there
is a bystander effect that occurs because
of the glut of images that we have I
think of this in
a particular sense consider the fact that we've now
been able to witness firsthand crimes and
and justices that decades before might have been unimaginable
to see with your own eyes our gardeners
killing for example but
I don't sense an increased outrage necessarily
I wonder as allen spoke earlier about
the instruments technology as an instrument to get us around
what's wrong with our
own cognitive perception I wonder
if instruments are also creating problems with
how we process the world around us
psychologists might call this the bystander effect right
a collective
looking at an injustice might consider the fact
that someone else might run
to the rescue of a person who's being harmed and
therefore no one does anything at all
for me this is a concern because the
importance of the Arts the access that we can create to
technology is a huge opportunity but I think that it might short-circuit
the impact that an individual work of art can have
when we experience it physically and more
so as for we
can speak more about prescriptions in a bed and
perhaps i'll leave it there but i want to remind us that this is a
historical idea it's an idea that certainly
Frederick Douglas had long before any
of us did on American soil about the importance of the Arts for
justice he argued during the Civil War in
a speech pictures in progress that art was what
was needed most for America to have a new vision of
itself and I think our work with
technology is to understand precisely what
that contribution has been one
of the endeavors i have now at harvard
both through teaching and in an initiative i hope
to create is to see whether or not we could harness the
power of technology to quantify
so that we don't just use
anecdotal sort of evidence to quantify
the role of the Arts in connecting groups
the fantastic
book by bill Bishop the big sort
has shown us that we have not by choice
but by circumstance have
come to live in an increasingly polarized climate
right we now no longer live or
come into contact with people who have divergent political
or religious views as often so
for example in 1976 he
reminds us less than one quarter of Americans lived in landslides
political counties in 2004
48.3 percent of Americans
did right I wonder if technology can help us
to understand how the arts have always integrated us allowing
us to see as Charles black did when
he heard Louis Armstrong's horn that we have
far more reasons to connect us to each other than we do
have reasons to stay apart and I hope we
about the productive quality of technology in that regard
and in many more aspects thank
we've got to get right and we're standing between you
all in one so I'm going to just do if I may a
informal thing and then we'll have this will stand up
and then we'll have this panel actually devolve into
lunch where you can ask your own questions of Sarah
and Alan but just real
quickly you mentioned
Martin Luther King and you found his transcripts
couple of scenes but I've actually read your book and
what astounded me is what the two seas were yeah
there were two seasoned oratory class yeah
that'd be probably order well
you know there he actually experienced many different
kinds of failure of course but we don't know precisely what
his response was to receiving those seas in
oratory class this is why I wrote the book the rise I
was curious to understand the impactful force of
so-called failure in people's lives the and how much were deprived of
road maps we need by not knowing these stories but perhaps
I mean more significant is the fact that he developed that
speech impediment you know later in his life and Harry
Belafonte asked him at one point how he overcame
it and he ultimately said it was about surrender
really to what his mission was you know and that
speech impediment went away I think that King
really is looking at the techno I mean he's maybe our greatest
exemplar of oratory as a technology
bringing us together as an artistic process and
you mentioned Charles black jr. hearing Louis
Armstrong and he said it was
because he could see genius but was also the music
right I mean how does that inform even
social justice well you know
I've spoken about this before Aristotle
really was consumed by the power of the Arts and
said it this way reason
alone is not enough to make men good you know that's
a cool and what
he was getting at is that the arts when something
is impactful as Louie Armstrong is
playing it kind of slips in the back door rational
thought you know that in for some like
Charles blacks friend who refused to
really see Louie Armstrong as a genius gets
them because of the prejudice of the day gets them
to understand common humanity right because you're no
longer to seeing the cypher of a body that's raced
that says that this is someone who's a lower class
than you and gets you to connect on a different non-rational
non sensible they're absolutely
use Allen's term level you know Alan
one of the things people may not know about you is
that you started as a jazz musician langless
Armstrong I hope a little bit to
extent was playing as a jazz musician connected
to technology in your mind or to
what extent it well formed I mean other people
have said this but my mother was
an artist and a musician of my father was a physiologist in
so the house I grew up at my grandfather
was a writer for the house I grew up in didn't
have any special rooms for one
of the other four and there anything well so
as I said I most scientists
don't make any distinction from
the standpoint of the feelings and
many of the impulses the thing that's
different in the
arts is how much how
much do you have to learn
in order to be a participant in each art
some of the arts are learnable
very readily some of the arts require
years in order to get in
there because of the amendment vast number of things
so in in jazz
the thing that you have
to develop jazz improvisation is like
driving an all-terrain vehicle at night
over out in the fields with a
5 watt bulb in order to it
is rather than ahead of you it's rather like
learning to drive in the first place where anybody
can drive a car at one mile an hour the problem
is the handle all of the things and to learn how to
drive you have to have a part
mind trained to recognize stop signs children
things in the street listen to the
person talking next to you what gear you in and most
learning of developed
things has this character so I when
think of the arts I don't think of something at differentiates
between standard arts and science I think of the arts
as how much work do you have to put in
to be a full-fledged fluent participant
and the most interesting thing about jazz improvisation
is how it both
matches up and differentiates from composition
in some cases it can be the
same thing some of the best organ pieces ever
written were written down by books to hooters students
listening to him improvise and they are fantastic
but some may
be better organ pieces were written very carefully by
Bach who differ was a great improviser
completely differentiated the two processes
and I think this is true in most other developed forms
because the difference is how much planning
can you actually do and there's a limit to the
amount of planning you can do when you're improvising and so tinkering
things together which is what I think the
American myth is about is not
the whole story and it shouldn't be so as a lot we
learned partly improvised of improvisational
team and you saw that you were at Utah
where universal gear to up which is where the graphical
came together with the technology and we create
a great graphical user interface as one of your great
predecessors and technology was JCR Licklider looking
at light of MIT who created the first wheel
graphical interfaces interactive computers
things like that and he used to say just like you did
that you stand in front of a painting for three
hours at a time he made his MIT students look
at a painting for three hours I'm going to end the
n we'll all just hang out need
but with the formal part you said you wanted to talk about prescriptions
Frederick Douglass in your
writing and stuff actually takes photographs
and uses that is the tool for social
justice how would you extend that to prescriptions
hmmm it's a great point well I should clarify Douglas
a was also a photographer right
deeply invested in this idea but his idea was that
the arts are impactful not just because
of the power of an artist to show us something that we might not ordinarily see
but because of how it creates images in
us right his idea was that the
arts are powerful because they create what he called thought pictures
it's beautiful really he's looking at
the phenomenology apart so what
erms of prescription I think what's most important
is that we yes focus on
the access the technology offers to artists to get their work out
there but that we encourage artists to make sure that their vision
and that their ambition is large right and
take on the social issues of the day such
that when it impacts us it can create a thought picture
that might as Douglas was arguing really change the world and what
you've really said is that both technology
and are both tools for
we humans are going to make of it first really want to thank both