PressPausePlay (free legal bittorrent download) is an uplifting and informative documentary about freedom and digital creativity. Most of the examples are from the music ‘industry’. Rahrahs from the likes of Seth Godin are balanced by the dour tones of Andrew Keen.
Is the status of creativity and creatives changing? In this wide-ranging documentary, we are asked to reflect upon the creatives ‘industries’, and consider whether changing production methods means that we are entering a post-industrial creative era. Some love it, some hate it, and some, most interestingly, are equivocal. Among the more or less fully converted is Seth Godin:
It used to be you didn’t become an artist to be rich, you became an artist because you had an idea to share, you had an emotion to share, and that’s where we’re heading again, and we’re going to see more people do more art in more ways than ever before.
Yes, but how? And what are the financial practicalities? And is it really ‘art’? In an environment in which ‘Any kid can use a cracked version or buy a version of Reason or Logic or Ableton and in about five minutes do what took 6 months or years 20 years ago’, Moby wonders:
Everybody’s equally excited and afraid, noone really knows where their next paycheck is coming from, but they’re really excited at their ability to create work and communicate directly with an audience.
These people are technological determinists. Bill Drummond says: ‘The technology always comes first. Then the artist comes along (Jimi Hendrix) … And abuses it and changes it …. So in that sense technology is great. I’m not so sure it’s as simple as that, for in the use and abuse the technology gets changed, but anyway, that’s perhaps not the most important issue. Rather, it’s what digital does to the very concept of art and media. According to David Weinberger:
In the creative world, it used to be that we knew where to go to get art, where to get entertainment, and they were in boxes, sometimes the boxes were Tv boxes, sometimes they were building boxes or the front page of newspaper which is a nice little box. That’s fantastic but of course there’s a price to pay to that old way as well, which is that somebody else is making your decisions and they are also human beings, its’s a very limited necessarily range of tastes and opinions and ideas and traditionally unfortunately fairly typically its been representative of particular empowered groups… Typically white guys …
I’m not sure art is a good term to use with digital products. It seems to me tied to a means of production and a historical production period in which reproducability was difficult if not impossible. So when Seth Godin says something like:
Art has been round for a really long time, but its only in the last fifty years that there’s been an industry, eg the music indusy, the movie industry. That’s new.
I just wish he’d use a less loaded phrase, such as ‘creative products’. It would avoid a whole lot of problems. That aside, I love the way several interviewees historically contextualise our creative period.
PressPausePlay also interviews the founders of production company Shilo, Andre Stringer and Tracy Chandler:
Andre Stringer:
The easiest way to understand Shilo is we’re a traditional production company for the most part, but we’ve come at it from a very untraditional sort of way. The traditional model says, there’s a director, there’s a post house, there’s an editorial company, there’s an advertising agency… And each of them has their own stake in what they’re making and there’s always this fight against it. By…harnessing all those things and saying like nowadays the guys who direct are sometimes the guys who design, the guys who direct are also sometiems the dudes who edit. That blended model really changes the whole landscape and it also sort says that anybody can do anything.
They must have worked out how to deal with egos very well … in industrial media, everyone likes to have their patch of expertese. Or is it more that that’s how we learned to function? It was safe, maybe even easy, maybe even necessary given the gear we had. But it didn’t give you much freedom unless you were at the top of the tree.
Tracy Chandler:
If a designer comes at directing something they might have a different approach than a traditional director might have and so comes out with a different product . It’s not just about whether something is better or worse, its about something can be different because people are coming at it from a different perspective.
Andre:
What having the ability to do more of the work ourselves gives us is the abili to be more free, more visceral, more alchemic with the way that the components come together. A lot less of it has to be extremely pre-planned and mo of it can be entirely improvisational, very much of the moment…Most of it comes out of the grassroots, learn-it-yourself, do-it-yourself mentality
Tracy:
There’s no formal training for what’s going on in the professional world right now.
[This is one of two posts written about PressPausePlay. Here's the other. Still from PressPausePlay.]
