The Physicality of the Thing
On the imitability of art grounded in the physical world
Living in Connecticut is sometimes like being a character in a Wes Anderson film.
Here’s one example. Wednesday afternoons, I drive to a dusty old post office nestled (like everything else) into a cozy corner of the woods. Behind this post office, somewhat inexplicably, is an equally dusty old indoor basketball court. There I meet up with a well-known painter who’s in his 60s and we spend 90 minutes shooting jump shots.
We also talk. About movies, art and creativity. Recently I asked him about generative AI and its impact on the art world. I expected him to shrug it off.
He’s well-established with a career that spans decades. He has “portfolio capital” and what seems like no shortage of work. I’d guess he’s as well-positioned as any creative to ignore the AI phenomenon. To my surprise he says he does think about it and what he tells me next strikes me like a bolt of lightning – implications for music coming immediately to mind.
He says that generative AI is impacting his technique. He’s leaning into thick, chunky paintbrush stabs. He’s making space for paint drips and accentuating the coarse textures of his brush stroke.
In other words, he’s emphasizing the part of the art that exists in the physical world or, as he put it, “the physicality of the thing”.
There is a natural complexity that arises when one applies gobs of different color goop to a canvas board. I’ve seen his work in person and can attest to its literal texture and the additional impact it brings to the viewer.
For all its impressive insights and cognitive abilities, AI does not yet exist in the physical world. It can only see the pixels in an image representing a single brush bristle captured accidentally (or serendipitously) in a skyline. It can perhaps try to imitate the effect in generating something new but, having never existed in the physical world, it will fail to be convincing and it will generate something that feels spurious – even where we cannot put our finger on what exactly is off.
For now, anyway.
Right. Onto music. A few days ago I mastered a song by a very cool artist (Mary Esther Carter). As I was working on it, I thought to myself, “wow! This song has a VIBE. I can inhabit it. I can see sweat on clothing and feel the heat off an amp head. I wonder how they did that?”. After sending off the master with a note complimenting the crew that made the thing I got a response saying “thanks! We recorded it live right off the floor!”
“There it is!”, I thought. The musical equivalent of physicality is “space”.
The work that is easiest for AI to replicate is the work that is built layer by single layer. An impressive keyboard part with crazy fast arpeggios? Cakewalk for the robot. Double bass death metal beat? How fast do you want it?
But if you put four musicians in a room and set up a $20 microphone - and even if the musicians weren’t very good - and even if the microphone was put into a weird sounding spot, I guarantee that you will, with that one channel of audio, capture something physical. Something unique. Something that exists in a sacred moment of space and time and that cannot be authentically replicated.
It certainly cannot be “generated”. And listeners will recognize the physicality of the work.
And your soul may exchange an understanding nod with theirs.