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You know that feeling when some thing you see strikes a chord in you, triggers something deep inside, resonates, sends vibrations through your inner state?
The modern urge is to take out your phone, or maybe, if you're fancier, a camera, and record it.
Often, when looking at the so-captured moment, it disappoints. It's nowhere near as vibrant, as visceral as experienced. No filter helps,.
In those moments, I often think to myself, 'I should learn how to paint.' Perhaps this explains why humans continue to create despite the technology supposedly capable of capturing it all. Even the best camera might never be able to really see what we see.
That's why the onset of the camera did not stop painters from painting, nor did the advent of music software mean that composers would quit using vintage synthesizers.
"Nowadays you can do all of this inside a machine. But to me, the screen and the computer can have a flattening effect on anything that goes on inside them. These old synthesizers, by contrast, are a bit wild, and unpredictable. They have personalities. They feel alive."
Max Richter in the CD Booklet for a recording of his 4 seasons
The rationalists of our time suggest that there's one set of truths, and reality can and should be neatly captured by sensors, translated into the 0s and 1s that are the language of the internet.
Why create, why express, when the picture has been taken millions of times before you by people who just like you, saw something in the item, or maybe they didn't; maybe all they saw was that millions of other people were taking a picture of it, forcing them to go ahead and do the same.
After all, the best way to be popular online isn't to fall out of any category; it's to neatly fit in to be authentic in the way that your chosen aesthetic requires.
"The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow."
Italo Calvino in Adventure of a photographer
Now, with genAI, why bother to write, compose, paint, or rhyme? All the hard work now is simply done by a machine for you, a great liberation, at least according to all the deeply invested VCs and SV cultists who could otherwise not care less about people's liberation (if anything their goal has always been addiction, which is just another enslavement).
But of course, if you ask ChatGPT to write a poem that conveys the scenery you view, it might not really succeed at finding the essence. It might give you some hotchpotch, an averaged-out version of whatever it was trained on.
Philosophers still have no consensus on what differentiates humans from machines; they warn that we're trying to become them. It might just be the wrong question to begin with. What's clear to me is that, at least what genAI is concerned, the difference is this: we all experience the world a little differently.
Earlier this week, I walked into a small gallery in the Levantehaus in Hamburg, a small exclusive shopping centre that used to be an office building erected according to the North American ideal in the 19th century.
Below a decent Vietnamese place, and opposite a Steiff plush toy shop, is nestled in one big room making up the VonWegen gallery. The exhibit on display: "The place you can't remember. The place you can't forget."
Artworks of four very different artists juxtaposed, all dealing with the question of how they view landscapes.
What drew me in was a massive canvas, an explosion of purple, blue, with spots of yellow. As I learned a bit later, it was by a Japanese artist drawing inspiration from Zen gardens. On closer inspection, the explosion appeared less haphazard and as if each stroke had been placed very intentionally, after careful consideration in an attempt to portray what the artist saw, not a figurative display but one of attempt at sharing the essence.
Opposite the large canvas, I stood in front of a painting of what looked like a wild flower, more real than life. The gallerist explained to me that part of Philippa Brücks signature was creating the hyperreal. Some even asked whether the painting was AI-generated.
The flower felt palpable, as if its branches were poking the air, at the same time I couldn't shake the eeriness. Just as when looking at AI-generated photography, yet unlike that, there was also a sense of awe at the painter's immense talent poured out in the form of an oil painting.
In a world where we experience scenes through the lens of our cameras, only to have them later judged by the crowd through likes and shares, who knows whether, at some point, such hyperreal images might not be more real to us? After spending hours scrolling through highly edited images, you can't help but feel that the nature around you is a bit dull.
If we live detached from nature, or simply lack the eyes to discover the little wonders happening all around us, how could we feel other than disappointed?
If AI-generated images fill the Google image search results, even standing in for real paintings of historic figures, and all period movies star filler-faced people, perhaps our whole perception of the past will eventually disappear. Why bother with the archive when you can generate an image of the person in question? If all we care is the now, what gives.
A third artist, Christian Augusts, whose works were more political in a way, showed landscapes under seeming threat, with blank spots leaving the viewer to fill them in as they desire. The artist believes that the future is already decided, and all he's doing is delivering Polaroids from the future, retrieved from our subconscious; he himself is just a vessel delivering them. Space disappears, and landscapes seem to be uprooted.
I felt reminded of the grass dying next to the big crossing in my neighbourhood. In May, when it had not rained for weeks on end in North Germany, a rarity yet a small catastrophe becoming more common. The polaroids just thought such smaller incidents forward, into the future with a little space to interpret.
The fourth and last artist, again, a complete 180 turn. With simple stokes, big impact achieved, one painting showed a forest landscape with a woman riding through on a horse, peaceful, harmonious, and a little mystical. It could have well been featured in a Nordic children's book, one nearly expected an elf to show up in the corner.
I walked out of the gallery, my soul replenished with awe and admiration, not without thanking the gallerist for all the explanations and the bottle of water he'd kindly offered me. More attuned to the world around me, inspired to write about it.
Proust once wrote that the true voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in seeing with new eyes. In a slightly modified version, this quote has ironically been used by travel agencies to sell you on the benefits of travelling. Although I doubt that mass tourism and resort holidays lead to the revelations Proust was after.
He was speaking to an internal, not an external voyage.
Each one of us views the world colored through the world of our subjectivity.
It shines through in the paintings, which shared the same theme, yet couldn't have been more different in feel, and for lack of a better term: aura.
It's evident to anyone reading Proust (apparently fewer and fewer people). You don't write thousands of pages on which, going by brain-rot TikTok dynamics, very little happens at all, dedicating whole pages to describing landscapes if you're not already a person well-attuned to paying close attention, locking the details into memory only to have them reappear later on during a flashback.
Our subjectivity is why rereading a great book never hits the same. It's how musicians can continue playing a piece through their entire lifetime, never quite being done with it.
Igor Levit, a pianist, when asked whether he could still listen to or play the Moonlight sonata by Beethoven despite having heard it thousands of times, responded: It's different every time. Every time I hear something new in it, there's a part of the piece that's always out of his control.
A state that sociologist Hartmut Rosa would describe as very aspirational, a state he has titled: resonance.
It's also something we are not capable of when our mindset is one of domination, complete understanding, control, utility.
There's beauty in not being in full control. Not capturing everything yet doing our best to express it.
In a world obsessed with quantifying everything, turning it into another data point, flattening it into a picture shared with millions of strangers, let's not forget we're not looking at the world the same way.
Not everything can and should be measured by this standard.
We paint, we compose, we rhyme and write in an attempt to express ourselves, to make ourselves heard and seen, to feel less alone in the world.
And sometimes, when we're lucky, someone discovers it and comes out of it a different person.
Feeling less crazy, less lost, reassured in not having gone completely numb yet.
Thanks for reading 💚
If you're in Hamburg, definitely check out the VonWegen gallery in the Levante Haus.
The team is down-to-earth and very friendly. Plus, there's also the great Vietnamese place just on the floor above so you get two in one: cultural and culinary delight ;))
Cover image: landscape photography by Ngoc Minh Ngo
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