Better technology pushes up the creativity bar

Over this weekend, a combination of Old Monk rum and good friends made for some interesting conversation that I thought was worth sharing. They say that alcohol (and neurosurgeons) open the mind, and after some paapdi chat and pani puri accompany said spirit, the universe suddenly seems a lot more clearer. One of the chaps, a semi-professional photographer pointed out that anybody with a low-end SLR camera considers himself a photographer nowadays. The art of composing a scene and capturing a rare moment has given way to the probabilistic approach involving taking 20,000 photos in a couple of hours and hoping that some of them turn out to be masterpieces. This is a photographic approach clearly modelled on the parable about the monkeys hitting keys on typewriters for long enough that they manage to produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Another chap, a talented music director, pointed out that music production was no different. While the likes of Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd had to bake the bricks they used to build their magnificent musical mansions, a contemporary musician copy pastes pre-recorded loops to create rich soundscapes with no more effort than the click of a mouse.

It raised an interesting point about creativity and art and its intersection with technology over the years. On the one hand, technology cynics point out that the current generation of creative people are the equivalent of athletes who use performance enhancing drugs. It’s not their own talent, but technology that enables creative expression, they claim. Lost is the art of photographic and musical composition, they bemoan. But if we rewind to the time when Gutenberg invented the printing press, we will notice that there was fair bit of bemoaning about the art of calligraphy and the destruction of the profession of scribes as the printing press made them obsolete. Technology cynics of that era waxed nostalgic about the handwritten and painstakingly illustrated scrolls that master scribes and brilliant illustrators used to create and how this soulless machine made it possible for every Thomas, Richard and Harold to publish anything they wanted.

If we fast forward to the 1960s, a similar debate erupted over the use of the electric guitar and how it made guitar playing “too easy”. The synthesiser arrived in the 70s and when the personal computer arrived, the rate of use of technology in art exploded. Is this a good or bad thing? Hard to say, but we should remember that Pink Floyd used technology that was not available to Jimi Hendrix a decade before them, and no one today considers one “better” than the other. The progression from Ilayaraja to A R Rahman follows a similar arc. Both are brilliant music directors who made the best use of the technology available in their era.

I think there’s something deeper here. The general trend in cultural expression has been that technology continuously pushes the envelope. And since we live in exponential times, the envelope is being pushed like speed post. If simply getting some sound onto an LP (or a hazy image onto a photographic plate) represented the pinnacle of creativity in the early part of the century, the bar has simply kept moving higher, as more and more people are able to do the easy stuff, like point & shoot photography and copy-paste music.