by Luke Dormehl
The gamble appeared to pay off. Under a review titled “House of Cards Is All Aces,” USA Today praised the show as “money well-spent” and among the “most gorgeous [pieces] of television” people were likely to see all year.27 President Obama admitted to being a fan. Netflix followed up its House of Cards success with three more well-received series: Hemlock Grove, Arrested Development and Orange Is the New Black. At the 2013 Emmy Awards, the company notched up a total of 14 nominations for its efforts.28 “It took HBO 25 years to get its first Emmy nomination,” noted American TV critic and columnist David Bianculli in an article for the New York Times. “It took Netflix six months.”29
Netflix’s success has seen it followed by online retailer Amazon, which also has access to a vast bank of customer information, revealing the kind of detailed “likes” and “dislikes” data that traditional studio bosses could only dream of. “It’s a completely new way of making movies,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos told Wired magazine. “Some would say our approach is unworkable—we disagree.”30
In Soviet Russia, Films Watch You
In a previous life, Alexis Kirke worked as a quantitative analyst on Wall Street, one of the so-called rocket scientists whose job concerns a heady blend of mathematics, high finance and computer skills. Having completed a PhD in computer science, Kirke should have been on top of the world. “Quants” are highly in demand and can earn upward of $250,000 per year, but Kirke nonetheless found himself feeling surprisingly disenfranchised. “After about a year, I decided that this wasn’t what I wanted to do,” he says. What he wanted instead was to pursue an artistic career. Kirke left the United States, moved back home to Plymouth, England, and enrolled in a music degree course. Today, he is a research fellow at Plymouth University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Computer Music Research.
In 2013, Kirke achieved his greatest success to date when he created Many Worlds, a film that changed the direction of its narrative based upon the response of audience members. Many Worlds premiered at the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival in 2013, and its interactivity marked a major break from traditional cinema by transforming audiences from passive consumers into active participants. At screenings, audience members were fitted with special sensors capable of monitoring their brain waves, heart rate, perspiration levels and muscle tension. These indicators of physical arousal were then fed into a computer, where they were averaged and analyzed in real time, with the reactions used to trigger different scenes. A calm audience could conceivably be jolted to attention with a more dramatic sequence, while an already tense or nervous audience could be shown a calmer one. This branching narrative ultimately culminated in one of four different endings.31
In a sense, companies like Epagogix, which I mentioned at the start of the chapter, offer a new twist on an old idea: that there is such a thing as a work of art that will appeal to everyone. Anyone who has ever read two opposite reviews of the same film—one raving about it and the other panning it—will realize that this is not necessarily true. Our own preferences are based on synthetic concepts based around inherited ideas, as well as our own previous experiences. My idea of how Macbeth should be performed on the stage is based on those performances I have attended in the past, or what I have read about the play. The same is true of the films I like, the music I enjoy, and the books I read.
“A fixed film appeals to the lowest common denominator,” says Kirke. “What it does is to plot an average path through the audience’s emotional experience, and this has to translate across all audiences in all countries. Too often this can end in compromise.” Kirke isn’t wrong. For every Iron Man—a Hollywood blockbuster that appeals to vast numbers without sacrificing quality—there are dozens of other films from which every ounce of originality has been airbrushed in an effort to appease the widest possible audience. Many Worlds suggests an alternative: that in the digital age, rationalization no longer has to be the same as standardization. Formulas can exist, but these don’t have to ensure that everything looks the same.32
A valid question, of course, concerns the cost of implementing this on a wider level. Alexis Kirke created Many Worlds on what he describes as a “nano-budget” of less than $4,000—along with some lights, tripods and an HD camera borrowed from Plymouth University’s media department for a few days. How would this work when scaled up to Hollywood levels? After all, at a time when blockbuster movies can cost upward of $200 million, can studios really afford the extra expenditure of shooting four different endings in the way that Kirke did? He certainly believes they can. As I described earlier in this chapter, the entertainment industry currently operates on a highly inefficient (some would say unscientific) business model reliant on statistically rare “superstar” hits to offset the cost of more likely losses. The movie studio that makes ten films and has two of these become hits will be reasonably content. But what if that same studio ramped up its spending by shooting alternate scenes and commissioning several possible sound tracks at an additional cost of 50 percent per film, although this in turn meant that the film was more likely to become a hit? If branching films could be all things to all people, studios might only have to make five films to create two sizeable hits.
Following the debut of Many Worlds, Kirke was approached by several major media companies interested in bringing him on board to work as a consultant. The BBC twice invited him to its headquarters in Manchester to screen the film and discuss his thoughts on the future of interactive media. Manufacturers were particularly interested in how this technology could usefully be integrated into the next generation of television sets. “This is something that’s already starting to happen,” Kirke says. In 2013, Microsoft was awarded a patent for a camera capable of monitoring the behavior of viewers, including movement, eye tracking and heart rate. This behavior can then be compiled into user-specific reports and sent, via the cloud, to a remote device able to determine whether certain goals have been met.33 Advertisers, for instance, will have the option of rewarding viewers who sit through commercial breaks with digital credits (iTunes vouchers, perhaps) or physical prizes. Because Microsoft’s camera sensor has the ability to recognize gestures, advertisers could create dances or actions for viewers to reproduce at home. The more enthusiastic the reproduction, the more iTunes vouchers the viewer could win.
Another company, named Affectiva, is beginning to market facial expression analysis software to the consumer product manufacturers, retailers, marketers and movie studios. Its mission is to mine the emotional response of consumers to help improve the designs and marketing campaigns of products.34 Film and television audiences will similarly increasingly be watched by nonspeech microphones and eye line sensors, along with social network scanners built into mobile devices, which adjust whatever they are watching according to reactions. If it is determined that a person’s eyes are straying from the screen too often, or that they are showing more interest in Facebook than the entertainment placed in front of them, films will have the option of adjusting editing, sound track or even narrative to ensure that maximum engagement level is maintained at all times.
A Moving Target
Traditionally, the moment that a painting was finished, a photograph was printed or a book was published it was fixed in place. We might even argue that such a quality forms part of our appreciation. With its fixed number of pages bound by a single spine, the physical organization of a book invites the reader to progress through it in a linear, predetermined manner—moving from left to right across the page, then from page to page, and ultimately from chapter to chapter, and cover to cover.35 As a result, a book appeals to our desire for completion, wholeness and closure.
No such permanence or fixedness exists in the world of The Formula, in which electronic books, films and music albums can be skipped through at will.36 This, in turn, represents a flattening of narrative, or a division of it into its most granular elements. As computer scientist Steven DeRose argues in a 1995 paper entitled “St
ructured Information: Navigation, Access and Control,” this analysis of structured information does not get us close to certain universal truths, “in the sense that a Sherlock Holmes should peer at it and discern hidden truth . . . but rather in the sense that the information is divided into component parts, which in turn have components, and so on.”37
This narrative unwinding was demonstrated to great effect several years ago when the American artist Jason Salavon digitized the hit movie Titanic and broke it up into its separate frames. Each of these frames was then algorithmically averaged to a single color using a computer, before the frames were recollected as a unified image, mirroring the narrative sequence of the film. Reading the artwork from left to right and top to bottom, the movie’s rhythm was laid out in pure color.38
Both Alexis Kirke’s Many Worlds and Salavon’s reimagining of Titanic represent two sides of the same coin. In a post-9/11 age in which our own sense of impermanence is heightened, past and present are flattened in the manner of a Facebook timeline, and the future is an uncertain prospect, what relevance do traditional beginnings, middles and ends have? This is further seen by the number of artworks that, imbued with the power of code and real-time data streams, exist in a state of constant flux. In the same way that the Internet will never be completed—any more than technology itself can be completed—these algorithmic artworks are able to adapt and mutate as new data inputs are absorbed into the whole.
An example of this was created in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where two members of Google’s Big Picture data visualization group, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, coded an online wind map of the United States, which presents data from the National Digital Forecast Database in the hypnotic form of a swirling, constantly changing animation.39 “On calm days it can be a soothing meditation on the environment,” Wattenberg says. “During hurricanes it can become ominous and frightening.”40 In a previous age of fixedness, a work of art became timeless by containing themes universal enough to span generations. Today “timeless” means changing for each successive audience: a realization of the artist’s dilemma that work is never finished, only abandoned.
In his latest book, Present Shock, cyberpunk media theorist Douglas Rushkoff seizes upon a similar idea to discuss the ways in which today’s popular culture reflects The Formula. Much as the artists of the early 20th century adopted the techniques and aesthetics of heavy-duty industrial machinery as their model of choice for the direction in which to take their art, so too does today’s entertainment industry reflect the flux-like possibilities of code. Unlike the predictable narrative character arcs of classic films like The Godfather, today’s most lauded creations are ongoing shows such as Game of Thrones that avoid straightforward, three-act structures and simply continue indefinitely.
Looking at shows like the NBC series Community and Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy, Rushkoff further demonstrates the technology-induced collapse of narrative structure at work. Community features a group of misfits at Greendale Community College, who constantly refer to the fact that they are characters within a sitcom. What story arcs do exist in the show are executed with the full knowledge that the viewing audience is well versed in the clichés that make up most traditional sitcoms. Family Guy similarly breaks away from traditional narrative storytelling in favor of self-contained “cutaway” gags, which prove equally amusing regardless of the order in which they are played, making it the perfect comedy for the iPod Shuffle generation. Like its obvious forerunner, The Simpsons, rarely does a plot point in Family Guy have any lasting impact—thereby allowing all manner of nonsensical occurrences to take place before the “reset” button is hit at the end of each episode.
A more poignant illustration of this conceit can be found in the more serious drama series on television. Shows like The Wire, Mad Men, The Sopranos and Dexter all follow ostensibly different central characters (ranging from Baltimore police and Madison Avenue admen to New Jersey mobsters and Miami serial killers) whose chief similarity is their inability to change their nature, or the world they inhabit. As Rushkoff writes, these series
don’t work their magic through a linear plot, but instead create contrasts through association, by nesting screens within screens, and by giving viewers the tools to make connections between various forms of media . . . The beginning, the middle, and the end have almost no meaning. The gist is experienced in each moment as new connections are made and false stories are exposed or reframed. In short, these sorts of shows teach pattern recognition, and they do it in real time.41
Even today’s most popular films no longer exist as unitary entities, but as nodes in larger franchises—with sequels regularly announced even before the first film is shown. It’s no accident that in this setting many of the most popular blockbusters are based on comic-book properties: a medium in which, unlike a novel, plot points are ongoing with little expectation of an ultimate resolution.
In this vein, Alexis Kirke’s Many Worlds does not exist as an experimental outlier, but as another step in the unwinding of traditional narrative and a sign of things to come. While stories aren’t going anywhere, Kirke says, in the future audiences are likely to be less concerned with narrative arcs than they will with emotional ones.
Digital Gatekeepers
A lack of fixedness in art and the humanities can have other, potentially sinister, implications. Because the “master” copy of a particular book that we are reading—whether this be on Kindle or Google Books—is stored online and accessed via “the cloud,” publishers and authors now possess the ability to make changes to works even after they have been purchased and taken home. A poignant illustration of this fact occurred in 2009 when Amazon realized that copies of George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four being sold through its Kindle platform were under copyright, rather than existing in the public domain as had been assumed. In a panic, Amazon made the decision to delete the book altogether, resulting in it vanishing from the libraries of all those who had purchased it. The irony, of course, is that Nineteen Eighty-Four concerns a dystopian future in which the ruling superpower manipulates its populace by rewriting the history books on a daily basis. More than 60 years after the novel was first published, such amendments to the grand narrative are now technically possible.
Writing in Wired magazine in July 2013, Harvard computer-science professor Jonathan Zittrain described this as “a worrisome trend” and called for digital books and other texts to be placed under the control of readers and libraries—presumed to have a vested interest in the sanctity of text—rather than with distributors and digital gatekeepers. Most insidious of all, Zittrain noted, was the fact that changes can be made with no evidence that things were ever any other way. “If we’re going to alter or destroy the past,” he wrote, “we should [at least] have to see, hear and smell the paper burning.”42
A Standardized Taste
In the early 1980s, a computer science and electronic engineering graduate from UC Berkeley set out to create a musical synthesizer. What Dave Smith wanted was to establish a standardized protocol for communication between the different electronic musical instruments made by different manufacturers around the world. What he came up with was christened the “Musical Instrument Digital Interface” and—better known by the name MIDI—became the entrenched unitary measurement for music. As a musical medium, MIDI is far from perfect. Although it can be used to mimic a wide palette of sounds using a single keyboard, it retains the keyboard’s staccato, mosaic qualities, which means that it cannot emulate the type of curvaceous sounds produceable by, say, a talented singer or saxophonist. As virtual-reality innovator (and talented musician) Jaron Lanier observes:
Before MIDI, a musical note was a bottomless idea that transcended absolute definition . . . After MIDI, a musical note [is] no longer just an idea, but a rigid, mandatory structure you couldn’t avoid in the aspects of life that had gone digital.43
This sort of technological “lock-in” is a
n unavoidable part of measurement. The moment we create a unitary standard, we also create limitations. More than two centuries before Dave Smith created MIDI, an 18th-century Scottish philosopher named David Hume wrote an essay entitled “(Of the) Standard of Taste.” In it, Hume argued that the key component to art (the thing that would come after the equals sign were it formulated as an equation) was the presence of what he termed “agreeableness.” Hume observed, “it is natural for us to seek a Standard of Taste; a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled.”44
Unlike many of the figures discussed at the start of this chapter, Hume believed that there were not objective measures of aesthetic value, but that these were rather subjective judgments. As he phrased it, “to seek the real beauty, or the real deformity, is as fruitless an enquiry, as to seek the real sweet or real bitter.” At the same time, Hume acknowledged that, within subjectivity, aspects do indeed exist that are either “calculated to please” or “displease”—thus bringing about his “standard of taste.”