The Lens Suite : Part 4

Underpinned by curiosity and creative labour, fields spanning art, entertainment and media have a long history of testing and adopting new technologies, often resulting in displacing old, and inventing previously unknown professions. Consider painters, musicians, printers and typesetters, photographers and front-end developers. Their shifts are a hallmark of creative industries which have aided the promotion of novel methods and workflows into societies, along with new concepts. 

At this moment, machine learning and AI disrupt outmoded assumptions and spawn conversations such as “New Models of Image Production” between Hito Steyerl with Noa Levin (Foam Magazine, ISSUE #66 - "Missing Mirror", p. 14); discussing paradigms of image creation, most importantly an optical one - recording exterior, seemingly objective realities - and a thermodynamic one, synthesising realistic dreamworlds at the cost of tremendous amounts of energy being required. 

As Steyerl & Levin’s conversation regards philosophical concepts (see end of part 1) as well as datacenter resources, the ethics and mechanics of the respective paradigms come into focus. In my opinion, this is incredibly important and valuable. Revealing the assumptions and inviting new perspectives will allow updated and meaningful modes of working and living.

The latest innovations in personal and crowd entertainment can appear threatening to traditional live entertainment, and yet we witness writer’s strikes in Hollywood and photographers standing off against generated imagery. Wherever we widen our view at this time, big shifts are happening and we do not stand alone. Unless we discuss these implications in wider circles, we can easily miss that disruptive technologies offer opportunities shaping paradigms, realities, emotions and professions of the future. 

We initially established personal and crowd lenses, opaque to their surroundings, displaying fully mediated vistas. Then we showed the importance of physical proximity to forming emotional responses, and how comprehensive narratives exceed the importance of closed display form factors. This widens the field of immersive entertainment, proposing the definition of group-lenses for comprehensive narratives within designed environments, easily accessible, surprising and memorable. 

The permeability of group lenses is continually inviting all crafts to collaborate, so that together the shape and effect of the luminous scenery can be more immersively and brilliantly executed. Many recent live entertainment tools already align with the lens concept I've described. However, by directly engaging with this reframing, we are beginning to uncover the new potential of these tools and how to improve them in a meaningful way. In doing so we can change what qualifies as entertainment, aside from the latest technologies. By moving the Mise-en-scène from the traditional stage and canvas into the lens concept, new venues, motivations, stakeholders and actors are brought into focus.

When you visit the Shangri-La Shard, London’s highest building to date, an elevator catapults you from the bustle of streets and nearby train station into a thirty fifth floor experiential-space, nested within an awe inspiring quiescent mega-city panorama. The general manager Kurt Macher constantly reimagines what is in fact his hotel's lobby,  into a larger-than-life interpretation of the current holiday theme, subject of the month, or one of his heartfelt topics. Macher and his team are driven by passion, excitement and a deep connection with their guests. They are supported by incredible florists and set dressers, and albeit hardly any AV technology, their setup has what a group-lens needs: Relatable narratives presented in front of a hyperreal background, and an elevator ride that drops you in and out of wonderland. 

Consider again some of the display types and spaces we have explored. Often, VR rides and theatres are located inside theme parks, or stages displayed inside the MSG-Sphere, or in a headset. The three lens types; personal, group, and crowd, and their different narrative layers should be viewed as parts of an apparatus that can be stacked and rearranged within each other to greater effect. Perhaps some of the points of our discussion can carry over into and include other fields, as well as widen our professional definition and motivation.