LOS ANGELES — A common fallacy of modern-day digirati thinking is that because things are new, they must invariably replace the old. This flies against logic and against history. Look at any technological innovation of note, and you’ll still find some level of use of a prior generation of technology. Those critical of modern copyright industries sometimes argue we are seeking to protect the buggy-whip industry at the dawn of the automobile, but I believe there are still manufacturers of such whips.

The creative industries, of course, don’t cling to old technologies at the expense of the new. Have you managed to avoid seeing a 3-D movie in the last year? And let’s not forget that the very notion of a motion picture is only about a century old.

In the 21st Century, there is perhaps more than ever before a hybrid culture of old and new, ancient forms of art fused with bleeding edge technology. That is true of creative industries. But based on discussions I’ve enjoyed during my work in the creative community the last few years, I would say that is even more true for individual artists and creators.

Some do hold desperately to the old, knowing there are plenty of others advancing the new. The New York Times today has an obituary on Walter Sear, a gifted audio engineer (yes, these talented people are still critical in today’s world of Garage Band software on Macs) who stubbornly maintained a recording studio of all analog equipment, some built himself. It was the position of Mr. Sear that digital sound — the conversion of the continuous wave forms of analog recordings into sequences of numbers approximating those waves, had killed the beauty of music itself.

“There has been a serious deterioration in the quality of recorded sound since the 1960s, which continues to get worse to this day,” The Times quotes Mr. Sear from a six-part critique he wrote of the music industry. Among the artists who sought out his talent and equipment were Nora Jones, Wilco and Wynton Marsalis. Bono and the Edge of U2 were at his studio recently working on music for a Spider-Man musical for Broadway. U2 certainly has embraced the latest advances in sound over the years, but still cherishes the “old” way of doing things as well.

I studied music in high school and college, and once considered pursuing a career as a professional musician (like many, I chickened out). My take on music is that it is both mathematics and language. It is mathematics in that it is, at its core, an expression of frequencies and time. It is that which is converted into the ones and zeroes of digital recordings. But it is also language. Like language, it is expression, and subject to new uses and forms of expression. Perhaps digital technology lacks the language aspect of music, the ever-changing expression.

That is what appears to be the argument of Jaron Lanier in his latest book, “You Are Not a Gadget.” Lanier is a brilliant technologist and also a musician; the first part of his book is a critique of digital music, but his level of thinking is at such a high level that I confess I don’t always follow every argument he makes to its full conclusion.

Many artists embrace the digital world but still find ways to express themselves in pre-digital forms. While here in L.A. I had the chance to meet with Astor Morgan, an accomplished professional photographer whose ability to capture the essence of individuals has led him to success in advertising photography but also celebrity shoots. Mr. Morgan is, among other things, the chairman of the L.A. Chapter of the Advertising Photographers of America.

Mr. Morgan is curator of a photography show called “i spy with my plastic eye,” now showing at 5th and Sunset Studios in Los Angeles. Mr. Morgan and Keith Vallot, Director of Operations at 5th and Sunset Studios, welcomed me to the show yesterday. The “plastic eye” reference in the show’s title is to the fact that every photo in the show was taken with the classic plastic cameras from the 1970s.

Each of these plastic film cameras — usually Chinese-made from companies such as Diana and Holga, almost toy-like in their construction — had unique imperfections, from light leaks to lens distortions such as scratches and odd gatherings of dust. It makes for a combination of realism and fantasy in the images that no digital camera could produce. (Please enjoy the images at the show’s web site.)

This show is a labor of love for Mr. Morgan. The proceeds are going to weSpark, a cancer support center. And Mr. Morgan most certainly uses the latest digital technology in his professional shoots — although he confessed to me he often carries along a plastic camera and takes a shot or two to see how it comes out. Often it’s that shot that is the one chosen to promote the musician or actress he has photographed.

Much of the debate about technology and creativity we hear online is about how new technologies have made us all creators. Digital technology and the Internet have leveled the playing field. These arguments are frequent online because the dominant voice online is that of technologists who have an interest in art and culture but have not devoted years of study to art. Artists are too busy creating to fuss about such things.

To some extent, there is truth in this argument. I can write this blog, and hope you not only read it but follow my words all the way down to this deep paragraph, without hoping an editor will approve its publication. I can shoot a video interview of an artist without knowing anything about how to operate a video camera other than pushing “record.”

But the more compelling discussion of the impact of new technologies on artists and their craft is how serious artists themselves simultaneously embrace and reject technological change. Mr. Sear had an intuitive sense of music, but a 19th Century musician, in an era before the piano roll, might have been horrified at his practice of actually capturing music in a recorded form. I suspect as photography came to be, some painters bristled (sorry about this pun) at the notion that a visual art work could be completely two-dimensional; aren’t the brush strokes and thickness of paint themselves part of the expression?

I’m glad I don’t have to spend all my time in the digital hollows of digirati debates about how soon we can declare dead the notion of the artist as someone different, someone unique. I’m glad I get to spend time with actual artists, who are all different, and all make unique choices in how they pursue a 21st Century hybrid world of art.

Share this:

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 8th, 2010 at 11:19 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under blogging, copyright opponents, creativity, creators, culture, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.