Technology – Page 24 – Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

Art machines in all our pockets

Taken by a friend, beside one of the Walthamstow reservoirs:

The point of showing this is that it is such a fabulously vivid and artistic photo, yet it was taken with a mobile phone.

Here’s another photo that I took myself, of a slogan that was adorning Tate Modern during the Summer of 2016:

That piece of self-important verbiage perfectly sums up how artists like to think of themselves, as leading the world. They dream up new Art things off the tops of their oh-so-Artistic heads, and the rest of us follow along behind them, changed by this new Art into living different lives.

The above bird illustrates a very different reality. And the above Tate Modern slogan ought, for the sake of accuracy, instead to read: “WE CHANGE ART CHANGES”.

We all now, all of us who want such devices (and this is very nearly all of us), have these amazing Art-making machines in our pockets, all the time. We don’t even have to deliberately search out Art-ops, the way I still like to on my photo-perambulations around London. It is sufficient that when, going about our normal business, in this case just taking a walk beside the reservoir, if an Art-op appears, it can, instantly and expertly, be captured.

This changes, for all of us, our experience of Art. Art, at any rate of this sort, has now become something that we can all of us do for ourselves. (And if we don’t have time to photo pretty birds, we all of us have mates who do, and the technology to be shown their efforts.) Which leaves Artists, who once upon a time used to earn their living by making pictures like the above bird, even more unable to compete than they first were, when photography was first invented. At least then Artists could switch to being photographers. Now, they have more and more realised that mere pictorial beauty is a business in which they simply cannot compete. They have consequently moved towards such things as political sloganeering, not just because they and their friends are becoming more politically opinionated. They have always been politically opinionated. The change for them is that shouting their politics in their Art is how they can now still hope to scrape some sort of living.

I expressed similar thoughts on this and related matters, in this rather wordier Samizdata piece. (Good grief, that was seven years ago.)

Battersea silhouettes

I’m still, as yet, going on quite long photo-walks. These are combined with shopping and a lot of exercise, the latter being even greater now what with public transport being off limits. There is plenty, since you ask, of social isolation, far more even than is usual. Nevertheless, I still fear that the photoing aspect may soon attract the disapproving attention of authorities, formal or informal. Too little shopping. Insufficiently strenuous exercise. Too much enjoyment. We shall see.

But in the meantime, yesterday afternoon, I checked out, again, the now stalled progress of the new apartment blocks that Frank Gehry has designed to go next to the Battersea Power Station. Last time I tried photoing these, the weather let me down. Not yesterday. Trouble was, the light was coming from behind the buildings I was most interested in photoing. But there was so much of it bouncing around that even though starting out from totally the wrong direction it was still a great improvement on the earlier trip, for photoing that Gehry-weirdness. Which I may or may not get to blogging about.

But as always, on a successful photo walk, the official destination was only part of the story. When I took another look this morning at what I had, I realised that, in among all the beautifully lit photos I photoed pointing one way, with most of the light coming from behind me, were photos like these, with me pointing the other way:

I’ve photoed that amazingly tasteless sculpture of the naked woman pointing herself forwards at the front of a boat, but this is by far the best photo of her I’ve ever photoed. The secret? Added cranes and roof clutter.

Also in the category list below is other creatures. Spot the other creature.

A year ago today …

I was in St Cyprien, in the extreme south of France, staying with my extreme south of France friends (aka GodDaughter2’s family).

Roof clutter ancient and modern, wires, orange tiles, fishing equipment, tourist crap with no soldiers or royal family (just Art), amazing plants (including little wine trees with mountains behind them), boats galore, and very well behaved sea for the boats to drive on. Not that all of those things are to be seen in these photos, but they are all very much to be seen in the extreme south of France:

And light. Lots of lovely light.

But, no outstanding single eyecatching Things, like in London or Paris. Just atmosphere and lots of it.

William Huskisson and his statue

In addition to photoing ducks in Pimlico Gardens, I also photoed this statue of William Huskisson:

Harsh sunlight can sometimes turn the subtleties of sculpture into a mixture of uninformative black and equally uninformative white, so the diminished but more ambient light I had to make do with may have helped, although a bit more ambient light would have helped. And I fear that in any sort of light, the inscription on the base of the statue (in photo 2) would have been a photographic struggle. You can just about make out that William Huskisson was born in 1770 and died in 1830, but if you care about these dates, you’d probably want to check them out.

The anonymous writer of this piece about the Huskisson Statue refers to it as “rather Roman”. This is like calling an F1 racing car “rather fast” or the Milky Way “rather big”. Huskisson dates from the era when politicians liked to dress up as Romans for portraits and statues, an era that ended with the mid-nineteenth century expansion of the franchise. At which point politicians stopped dressing in a way that emphasised how different and aristocratic and educated and virtuous and special they were, and switched to being ceremonially portrayed in the way that they actually dressed in their regular lives, i.e. a smarter version of the way everyone dressed. “I’m special” turned into “I’m one of you”.

Huskisson’s main claim to fame now is that he was the first mere person ever to be killed in a railway accident. Lots of people must already have died in the course of constructing railways and locomotives, but Huskisson was the first civilian, so to speak, to be killed by this newfangled technology.

More impressive to me is that, as much as he could manage to be within the limits of political necessity and ambition, Huskisson was an old-school classical liberal. At one point in his career, somebody tried to get him to impose a legally enforced minimum wage. Huskisson brushed the notion aside as foolishness. Good for him.

Here is what the Adam Smith Institute’s Madsen Pirie has to say about Huskisson.

Industrial decay beyond London Gateway

I’m doing a lot of photo-archive trawling just now, as you can imagine, what with photoing itself being less easy. And I came across one that I should have included in this lot from one of my London Gateway treks in 2013, but for some reason I didn’t. It’s one of my very favourite photos:

Very post-Soviet, I think.

At the top of the Walkie Talkie

In January 2016, I and a friend visited the top of the Walkie Talkie. And in April 2016, I posted one of the photos I took during that visit, the third of these three Walkie Talkie photos. Somewhat later, in September 2017, I posted quite a few more of the photos I took during that same visit, of my fellow photoers, surprise surprise. Galleries were harder to do and to view on the old blog, blah blah, reprise. And now that galleries are so much easier to do and view, here’s another clutch of photos from that day, this time showing what the inside of the top of Walkie Talkie is like.

Getting into the Walkie Talkie was quite a palaver, and I’ll bet that hasn’t got any easier. So lots of people who will never want to endure all this palaver to visit this place themselves might nevertheless appreciate being told what the inside of it looks like. So, here is this next clutch of photos:

When you google Walkie Talkie, you get lots of moaning from a few years back about how terrible it is. I love it. And I continue to tell all my friends, and you lot, that eventually it will be greatly loved. But, this evening anyway, I could find no one who agreed with me.

A crane cluster in Monaca

Mmmmmm. Cranes:

Photo featured in a pro-fossil-fuel tweet by Salena Zito.

These cranes are in Monaca, where Shell are building a big natural gas … Thing. Monaca is just north west along the river there from Pittsburgh. It was visited last August by President Trump in campaign mode.

“Is now the moment that using video has become the default thing that people do when they just want to talk to someone?”

Michael Jennings (he who got the pictures back (thank you Michael)) writes this on Facebook. It’s not personal, so I’m pretty sure he won’t mind me recycling it here, even if I don’t believe a link is in order:

Video calling has been technically possible for 50 years, and telephone companies made various attempts in the first 40 of those years to get people to buy it, but nobody was interested. A sizeable portion of people have had video calling available to them as an option (for free) for about ten years. However, it was still only used in niche cases.

Is now the moment that using video has become the default thing that people do when they just want to talk to someone?

I do not now do this, nor even know how to do it. What’s the betting I do get to do it, some time during the next month or so? I’m pretty sure I will, if you-know-what drags on longer than we all now are hoping.

It would mean me getting a computer with a camera on it, which I do not now have. But I’ve been thinking about getting a new laptop for a while now, for photoing and blogging when out and about. Will video-phoning be the killer app that pushes me over that line? Or, maybe I should do as Michael says, and get a new phone.