In Which It Was Another Generation

After the Cold War, A Long Trek

by ALEX CARNEVALE

In difficult times we harken back to that which brings us life. The success of America's aims abroad had peaked when we sent the monstrosity known as the Soviet Union packing. The Russia people were beginning would eventually be ruled by Vladimir Putin and the mob. America triumphed in a new age of interstellar peace and happiness. Basically we were these guys.

A lot of us were discovering things about ourselves. The decade of the 1990s would spawn a number of such well-intentioned malcontents, Pauly Shore and Bob Saget to name a few. But the good people were the space people.

The generation before had been marked by the constant monotone of war which found a perilous future in time and space, along with profound moments (like those in the songs of whales) that allowed us to remember what we'd lost. Captain Picard didn't want to blow anyone's face off. He wasn't quick to the gun. He was never even kind of a dick.

The technology that surrounded these peaceful warriors had a relatively negligible effect on its denizens, whose mental processes largely weren't different from 20th century norms. In the character of Data, Star Trek: The Next Generation made an artificial human into humanity and went in depth to prove a machine was, in fact, still a man.

Although men could find whatever drink or food they desired transported to their room, this did not dim their enthusiasm for conquest. Relationships were short-lived, they were as real as they had been before: only more fleeting in their duration. The quickening of life did not quicken the souls of these peacefaring folk.

It can be said that the point of this exercise was to chronicle the fate of man as he adapted himself to the stars, but whatever development would have been made along those lines, Wesley Crusher was a weak-minded syphocant, the symbolic lovechild of a mentally ill Picard. Others failed to adapt as poorly as Wesley — Troi nearly went insane once per season, and Riker always had a little Stephon Marbury in him.

In the Emmy-winning episode "The Inner Light" a probe broadcasting the dying wish of a destroyed civilization attached itself to the handsome Picard. Jean-Luc Picard's dream was of a pretechnological civilization, and he himself adheres to the aims of the age — a promised benign future for him and his family, and obedience to whatever God he chose. In contrast, Data was the far more complex thinker.

Man and machine are destined to become entwined together in bondage, and Star Trek: TNG's plan was to bring that out of hiding, see how the old values held up in a world where you could beam down to a planet full of evil dwarves. This was how we could decide whether technology would overwhelm us entirely.

Among the alien landscape, these figures embodied the older perspective, the West as it was in the world. The Borg became Picard's biggest enemy, the perversity of technological advancement, the hive mind that will abide no other. We were always in greater danger from some casual vicissitude of modernity, like sacrificing whales or changing the timeline. Man's environmental indulgence slowly became the larger symptom of his fate.

Before this period, we imagining ourselves living on the moon, exploring Mars. Then Star Trek came and reminded us that despite this, we were very much alone in the universe.

Is this a future we would want? A lifetime of policing galaxies may be too much to ask from any starfaring race. In the real world, America would of course have her own foreign policy adventures against Communist enemies both real and imagined. The Klingons and the rest disappeared, they were pacified by the entreaties of the Federation. If mankind (America) had to stand atop the galaxies, would he have to also lose his mind and sense of purpose?

Star Trek: TNG was a phenomenon on its debut. After a clumsy first season they soon got to Data and what the rest of it meant by the second season. In the middle seasons the show would abandon the alien-of-the-week concept and expand the purview of the show.

By the seventh season it had been one time travel episode too many and Data had a ho in every city so things were backtracking fast. Picard was looking extremely fatigued, and the lines under Riker's eyes made viewers sad and nostalgic for the last of the exultants.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.

star trek: first contact storyboard

"Snails" — The Format (mp3)

"The Compromise" — The Format (mp3)

"Dead End" — The Format (mp3)

In Which We Explain The Parting of the Sensory

Ways of Peeing

by Tavet Gillson

Visual art and technology are entwined in a tumultuous relationship.

Every so often, a technological breakthrough (linear perspective, the camera obscura, the photograph, the computer) revolutionizes the way the world produces and interprets images. These sorts of transformations are sudden and unequivocal: the new way of seeing swallows up the old visual order, forcing artists to adapt to new techniques and conventions.

Take the word “cat,” for example.

“Cat” means roughly the same thing whether it is handwritten, typewritten or on a webpage. But a painting of a cat is different – it doesn’t look the same as a photograph of a cat, and a film of a cat isn’t much like the other two. The meanings of images are rooted in their construction, whereas the meanings of written words are largely unaffected by their means of transmission.

Technology has the power to reinvent vision, and to retroactively alter established art forms. In the mid nineteenth century, the invention of the photograph caused the rapid, simultaneous development of hyper-realistic panting (with flat, high-contrast space) and its blurry, emotive counterpart, impressionism (filled with exaggerated colors and visually ambiguous forms).

The psychological impact of the Daguerreotype catalyzed two opposing, intensely experimental movements in painting, one in which artists sought to infuse painting with photographic truth; another which rejected the exactness of the mechanical image in favor of a deeper investigation into the tactile qualities of oil pigment.

Manet's Olympia

The best uses of technology produce transcendent, uncanny works of art.

In the 1860s, Édouard Manet exploited the party-snapshot voyeurism of high-contrast photography to dramatic effect in his paintings Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe.

Fifteen years ago, James Cameron’s Terminator 2 convinced us of the T-1000’s bloodthirsty omnipotence by artfully weaving morphing and reflection mapping (then brand new CG techniques) into a film narrative. We remember these works because they are modern visual dreams, freed from the shackles of traditional perception.

But novelty on its own does not guarantee aesthetic victory. Computers aren’t as paradigm-shattering today as they were ten or fifteen years ago, even though computer technology is always “new” and constantly changing. The day-to-day evolution of technology does not guarantee the aesthetic advancement of art.

A lot of digital artists suffer from short-term memory, and from an attraction to technology rather than to what technology can do for art. Techies aren’t the most culturally shrewd bunch (they love Anime and part their hair down the middle), so most of the digital art on the Internet consists of bizarre, Frazetta/Geiger-influenced illustrations of sci-fi robot women with huge-breasts.

Richard Linklater’s high-tech rotoscoped movies Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly are likewise hindered by a geeky preoccupation with the latest digital toys. Waking Life was praised for its “cutting-edge” use of digital tracing, but the visuals fail to justify a script dripping with pretentious, freshman-year philosophy. In A Scanner Darkly, Linklater goes to great lengths transplanting a generic comic book style onto an already-existing live-action movie.

Less derivative digital art, sometimes called “processing,” is usually too “glitchy” and cold for the average viewer. Shifting grids, abstract 3D shapes and unrecognizably scrambled media clips tend to conjure an atmosphere of disaffected, confused alienation.

Godfrey Reggio’s Naqoyqatsi, one of the more highbrow examples of “digital art,” attempts to make sense of the digital pastiche by cycling through every technologically themed image in existence, no matter how passé or ugly (to the music of Philip Glass, no less). Like a lot of academic art about mass media, Naqoyqatsi falls victim to the schizophrenia it is trying to parse.

Of course there are exceptions – the digital artists Jeremy Blake (who committed suicide in July) and Paul Chan, fuse romantic, mystical imagery with postmodern, high-tech nonlinearity.

Ryan Trecartin’s sprawling experimental film A Family Finds Entertainment uses digital effects and pays homage to postmodern confusion, but maintains a blazing, unified aesthetic throughout.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y5AxLiUqC8]

Not surprisingly, Blake, Chan and Trecartin all have educational backgrounds in traditional media.

Jeremy Blake's girlfriend Theresa Duncan's blog. More about them here.

Visual art is about seeing, and technology has the capacity to deepen our understanding of that complex cognitive process. Technology can create and collapse genres. It can transpose the characteristics of one medium onto another and it can breathe new life into old forms (with the aid of software, graphic designers have distilled Warhol and Rosenquist into an even slicker, more ubiquitous mass-media aesthetic).

The images that stick in our brains are the ones that mean something in the context of our visual history. Now that the DIY digital media boom has slowed, we can bring a bit of experience to bear on our judgment of emerging art. The next time you’re blown away by something that looks brand new, don’t forget Manet’s chalk-white picnic nude, or that wonderful T-rex in Jurassic Park.

Tavet Gillson is an MFA candidate in experimental animation at CalArts. You can see more of his work here.

IF TODAY IS THE SAME AS YESTERDAY TOMORROW WILL BE THE SAME AS TODAY

"Moonshiner" - Cat Power (mp3)

"Calculus Man (alternate mix two)" - Modest Mouse (mp3)

"Sample and Hold (Tumbledore edit)" - Neil Young (mp3)

"Dead Lovers' Twisted Heart" - Daniel Johnston (mp3)

"Talk Show Host (live on the BBC)" - Radiohead (mp3)

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

Becca's review of My Kid Could Paint That.

Our love of Tony Romo.

Just the way it pulled apart.