This essay was published in Luxury Briefing in July 2014
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Faking It
by Alexander Gallé
6 July 2014
The film "Tim's Vermeer" (2014)
documents the story of a hacker/inventor, Tim Jenison, as he successfully
recreates a Vermeer painting using various optical tools that were available to
Vermeer in the XVIIth century. The film makes a convincing case that
technological inventiveness, rather than artistic mastery, was the reason why
Vermeer's paintings were so much more vivid and realistic than any of his
contemporaries' work. Tim's use of a cleverly positioned small mirror -
to evaluate the difference at any point between an object's colour and its
painted representation - turns the painter's role into nothing more than an
information processor, albeit a very precise and meticulous one.
The academic reaction to this analysis of one of
the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age has been somewhat negative, as
you might expect. This is mostly because any assertion on the use of
technology in fine art is wrongly interpreted as an accusation of being a
"faker", of not really being as great an artist as one pretended to
be.
In his book "The Age of Intelligent
Machines", Ray Kurzweil explains the exponential acceleration of
technology by arguing that any field of science or engineering that comes
into contact with information technology, will itself become an information
technology, which then allows it to evolve at the same rate of acceleration as information
technology. Since the 70s, the effect of this acceleration has been visible in
just about every sector of industry: planes become flying computers, cars
become computers on wheels, and the collective intellectual output of humanity
becomes accessible on pocket-sized computers called smartphones.
And yet, Kurzweil's central claim - that
artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence within the next 25
years - seems to trigger a rather negative reaction among academics.
Every time AI reaches a new groundbreaking result in a field thought to
be critical to developing intelligence, "true" intelligence is
apparently about something even more elusive, and the method used to achieve
the result is derided as "faking it", much in the way that technology
in fine art is thought of as "faking it".
Technology's impact has been huge in the luxury
sector, too, not only because it has helped some adventurous brands go much
further than previously thought possible, but mostly because it has
significantly reduced the cost of producing high quality goods, thereby making
them available to people who until not so long ago would not have been the
luxury sector's target audience.
As a result, a similar kind of denial has been
creeping into the luxury sector, belittling the achievements made by newcomers
and tech-oriented brands. Tesla's cars, apparently, have no
"love". The best new world wines, apparently, have a "goût
technologique". Brands like Apple are, apparently,
"masstige". Never mind the fact that everyone remembers their
jaw dropping when they first got into a Tesla, drank a glass of Bonny Doon's
"Cigare Volant", or had an iPhone in their hands, "true"
luxury suddenly seems to require many more elusive attributes, and technology
is somehow perceived to be just a way of "faking it".
Is it true you need soul to create great art?
Yes. Is it true there is more to intelligence than beating Kasparov
at chess? Yes. Is it true you need culture to create luxury
products? Yes. But technology does not fake those human attributes.
Rather, it augments humans' ability to leverage those attributes, and to
allow more of us to enjoy their fruits. Technoluxe doesn't fake luxe, it
augments it.
