“I am sure the next step will be the electronic image, and I hope I shall live to see it. I trust that the creative eye will continue to function, whatever technological innovations may develop.”
—Ansel Adams
How can we imagine art that doesn’t exist? Science fiction is the genre of the future, and depictions of futuristic art pose much the same challenge as creating futuristic worlds more generally. Many variables—from technology and tools to social and economic factors—have an impact, and the farther we go from the present moment, the more difficult it is to extrapolate. How do we peer beyond the singularity and create something that is strange, right on the edge of being utterly incomprehensible, but still relatable to a present-day audience?
It’s a problem in two parts: first to come up with something that feels futuristic and weird, and second to make it intelligible to a contemporary audience. For the first part, art history provides examples of how art changes over time, with patterns we can project into the future. The key to the second part is in the Ansel Adams quote above—the human element, the creative eye, the choices we make in how to make use of new tools—these are what give art deeper meaning, and let us connect now to artforms that do not yet exist.
Art of the Past and Present
Science fiction often looks at the impact of advances in technology, and art has long been shaped by the tools and technologies that humankind has had at hand. Early cave paintings had a limited color palette in earth tones: red and yellow ochre, carbon black, lime white.1 Blue pigments were not developed until much later, so that color is absent from the earliest art. Over time, the popularity of various pigments rose and fell, and new techniques for mixing and storing paints were developed.
One seemingly small advance that had a profound impact was metal paint tubes with screw-on caps, invented in 1841 by John G. Rand.2 This allowed artists to buy premixed paints that not only lasted longer before drying out but were also portable enough to be used outside of a studio setting. Painters like Monet could now bring a full palette of colors and paint in a garden, a field, or a rocky beach rather than working from memory. This ability to paint outdoors was pivotal in the rise of Impressionism.
Around the same time, the invention of photography had a wide range of effects on the art world, introducing a new medium for artists that raised concerns for the livelihood of painters. After all, why sit for a portrait when instead you could have a photograph? The actual impact of photography on mid-19th-century painters was mixed. Some rebelled against it, but others embraced it. Degas, for instance, had a passion for photography, which influenced the way he portrayed subjects in motion through the use of blurring.3
Other artists of this period recognized that there is more to art than merely the mechanical generation of an image, as highlighted in this quote by painter and art critic Jan Veth in De Nieuwe Gids:4
So how is it that a drawing by a great artist has so much more to say than a photograph, which depicts the lines and the modeling of a body as correctly as possible?…A machine shows, unthinkingly but very accurately, what everybody can see. But with any subject an artist sees the true character, the expression that it gives…That is why a scratch by his hand means more than all the photographs.
As a photographer myself, I disagree that photography is an unthinking mechanical endeavor. A camera is a tool with features and limitations, not unlike a painter’s brush, and what makes a photo meaningful is the choices of the photographer—the subject, the focal point, the composition, etc….all shaped by the person behind the camera.
Modern day visual artists (both professional and amateur) have a wide array of physical and digital tools at our disposal. I have a point-and-shoot camera that fits in my pocket with sufficient zoom to show the craters on the moon and a drawing app on my phone loaded with digital brushes and textures. We have photo-editing software to retouch photographs, and increasingly sophisticated CGI for films.
I love the challenge of working with the features and limitations of a camera. The camera on my phone, for instance, has very little zoom. It will not produce detailed photos of distant birds, or show the craters on the moon. So I don’t use it for those things. I shift my focus to things that are closer—a honeybee on a dahlia, or water droplets on autumn leaves.
The type of camera makes a difference, too. A traditional film camera has only a viewfinder, modern DSLRs and point-and-shoot digital cameras generally have both a viewfinder and an LCD display. On my phone, there is no viewfinder at all, only the screen. Shooting photos without a viewfinder lends itself to odd angles and perspectives, because I no longer need to hold the camera near my face. My photographs are shaped by the camera I use even before I take the shot—because knowing which camera I have changes what I look for, how I frame shots in my mind. I work within the limitations of my camera, and look for ways to take advantage of its features.
We are constantly adapting to new technology and tools. AI image and text generators are becoming ever more sophisticated, to the point where human artists and authors are worried for their livelihoods. At first glance, this ominous dynamic between technology and art seems similar to the early days of photography, but AI generators are problematic in ways that early cameras were not. As John Picacio says in his essay earlier this year, AI generators operate by stealing the work of artists and authors. This isn’t a limitation like the lack of zoom on my camera phone; it is an important legal and ethical issue. It makes AI generators a threat to artists in a way that the advent of photography was not: they are collage-cameras pre-loaded with other people’s photographs, word processors playing Mad Libs with other authors’ quotes. The most intuitive analogy I’ve seen so far comes from Ted Chiang, who describes ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of the web.5
The core problem lies in the way these AI generators are being used and monetized. An AI that worked exclusively with input for which the artists or authors have given consent and compensation would not raise the same concerns. Used ethically, an AI generator could be a tool for artists, rather than a threat.
This dynamic, too, is useful for envisioning the future of art. Ethical and social considerations shape art’s content and its form, playing a role at least as important as that of advances in technology, if not more so.
Art of the Future
From pigments to portable paints, to advances in photography, the changes in the technologies of artistic tools are relatively easy for science fiction writers to extend forward in time. Works of science fiction have created a wide range of interesting and memorable futuristic art. Imagined future humans create art on the walls of generation ships (How High We Go In the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu ), sculpted into clouds (“The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D” by J.G. Ballard ), even stretched across entire planets (“Zima Blue,” Love Death & Robots; based on a story by Alastair Reynolds). In Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, a single character can sing choral music alone; Jennifer Marie Brissett’s “A Song For You,” has music composed by an android, based on patterns of falling rain. Imagined technologies open up entirely new mediums—dreams can become analogous to television, a new platform for art and entertainment (Hyacinths by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro).
Fictional future art is, by necessity, an extrapolation from what we know. It is easier to imagine shifts that are extensions of the trends happening now, harder to guess the paradigm shifts that will arise as new technologies emerge, or as the zeitgeist shifts. Fictional futures will often end up being wildly inaccurate, because there are always factors that we cannot foresee. I do not know, for instance, how AI generators will change the landscape of art, or even how large or small their impact will ultimately be. But I remain hopeful.
I opened with a quote from Ansel Adams, a quote that expresses not only hope, but also faith that human creativity will continue to persevere, whatever new technologies might bring. I share that hope, that faith. I take photographs from my own irreplaceable perspective, and I write stories that are uniquely mine and deeply human. There is more to art than the surface characteristics of the image, and more to stories than the pattern of the words.
What makes art meaningful is our choices, regardless of the tools we use.
1https://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/intro/early.html
2John Goffe Rand. John Goffe Rand patent, Improvement in the Construction of Vessels or Apparatus for Preserving Paint, & c., 1841 Sept. 11. John Goffe Rand papers, circa 1832-1960. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
3Zachmann, Gayle. “Developing Movements: Mallarmé, Manet, the ‘Photo’ and the ‘Graphic.’” French Forum 22, no. 2 (1997): 181–202. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40551964.
4Quote as translated into English by Rooseboom, Hans, and John Rudge. “Myths and Misconceptions: Photography and Painting in the Nineteenth Century.” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 32, no. 4 (2006): 291–313. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20355339.
5Chiang, Ted. “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web.” The New Yorker, February 9, 2023.
© 2023 Caroline M. Yoachim
