The Mimic Machine

[version]

" ... the fakesimilies are getting more and more convincing... "
BLISSBLOGGER

" ... it's difficult not to assess them purely on how much they can pass as old school, i'm not sure is that the point or not... "
SUFI



The other I day came across someone talking about an old book they'd bought called 'The Grammar of Ornament' (1856) and they mentioned the following:

In his introduction to 'Arabian Ornament' he makes a beautifully succinct Hegelian point that the Arabians first made 'crude and imperfect' imitation or use of patterns and styles they found in Byzantine churches and other conquered populations, but that this attempt at copy or return to a style was the necessary step to creating an entirely new body of art. The new only arises out of a return to the old, but this return always fails as such - it will always fail to recreate the lost age, but this failure will in turn become its own substantively new set of traditions.

The logic's sound, but I'm wondering whether we've become such great mimics this process can no longer take place. You listen to some of the jungle revival stuff and it's anything but 'crude and imperfect'. If anything, it's too perfect. It adheres so precisely to the old traditions there doesn't seem much room for a 'substantively new set'.

I'm aware I'm walking a tightrope here and consciously trying not to slip into the now-classic k-punk/Dissensus "No Future: Why's Nothing as Good as Jungle?" discussion we've rehashed a million times, so I'll stress the emphasis on mimicry across the various disciplines, from 'Soundcloud Junglism' to photorealistic painting and illustration, and its relationship to technology.

Is mimicry what we've always striven for? Have the various developments simply been tangents on the road to 1:1 representation? Is the range of possible outcomes shrinking as various techniques and technologies are refined? Is the alleged lack of imagination these days attributable to a constricting of the feedback loop from the machine end rather than the human? Can you put the blame on the machines when we're the ones building them?

If someone today were to simulate a bass guitar, would they produce the 303 or something close to the sound of a bass guitar?

 

[luka]

im quite interested in all these things too. like that new yorker article i mentioned the other day.

 

[version]

im quite interested in all these things too. like that new yorker article i mentioned the other day.

This one?

How Perfectly Can Reality Be Simulated?

Video-game engines were designed to mimic the mechanics of the real world. They’re now used in movies, architecture, military simulations, and efforts to build the metaverse.

www.newyorker.com

https://archive.ph/7ts5k

 

[luka]

yep

 

[version]

you couldnt build what corbyn and sanders had from nothing. i dont know how it happens. solar flares or something.

I like this idea of a sort of miracle being the one thing which can't be simulated, like the Anarchist in Lot 49's description of the miraculous as the intrusion of another world into this one. You can simulate certain things, but you can't simulate the spark, the miracle.

 

[luka]

i was talking about the other day too wasnt i

 

[version]

i was talking about the other day too wasnt i

Yeah, I've linked the two threads up via your quote.

 

[version]

A key question is "What's the appeal of simulation?". Why do we want to copy things? What do we get out of it?

 

[version]

Is the range of possible outcomes shrinking as various techniques and technologies are refined? Is the alleged lack of imagination these days attributable to a constricting of the feedback loop from the machine end rather than the human?

"...reading the same books over and over, trying to extract new insights, which in turn would lead to innovation, since those insights you extracted probably weren't what the author was going for, but your own unique take on the matter." I have never been much of a book reader tbh, but I have read a lot of blogs/articles/forum posts from web though. I remember before the current internet information overload (pre 10s), how I were making new insights by understanding writings a bit wrong, because I couldn't fill all the gaps by Googling internet's endless sea of information. Today, you can also easily find huge amounts of information from Youtube about different topics. All the gaps are filled, which can make your creative thinking lazy.

 

[blissblogger]

Most groups - most artists... start out imitating. Most? Nearly all, I should say, is closer to the truth

(this probably applies to most painters etc etc. certainly most writers, as my early music crit scribblings would reveal)

but the getting-it-interestingly-wrong phenom doesn't seem to happen like it used

one thing is that digital technology makes it so easy to create exactly that sound you are aspiring

there's also musicians magazines with in depth interviews and musicians forums where people trade info on how to get such and such a guitar sound, secrets of how to program a drum machine

there's vastly far more documentation out there and readily available about the nitty-gritty technical stuff - memoirs by engineers like Geoff Emerick of Abbey Road fame, in depth interviews

so you can get it, that sound, and be satisfied with it, and perhaps the inadvertent innovation-through-incapability process is short-circuited.

the creativity if there is any is juxtaposition of multiple influences, different sounds aspired to and achieved. a pastiche in the other meaning of the word, more like a medley or smorgasbord

 

[version]

Most groups - most artists... start out imitating. Most? Nearly all, I should say, is closer to the truth

(this probably applies to most painters etc etc. certainly most writers, as my early music crit scribblings would reveal)

but the getting-it-interestingly-wrong phenom doesn't seem to happen like it used

one thing is that digital technology makes it so easy to create exactly that sound you are aspiring

there's also musicians magazines with in depth interviews and musicians forums where people trade info on how to get such and such a guitar sound, secrets of how to program a drum machine

there's vastly far more documentation out there and readily available about the nitty-gritty technical stuff - memoirs by engineers like Geoff Emerick of Abbey Road fame, in depth interviews

so you can get it, that sound, and be satisfied with it, and perhaps the inadvertent innovation-through-incapability process is short-circuited.

the creativity if there is any is juxtaposition of multiple influences, different sounds aspired to and achieved. a pastiche in the other meaning of the word, more like a medley or smorgasbord

Yeah, the impulse to imitate seems to have been there from the start, the change has been in how much easier it's become to do so.

We're not at 1:1 yet. There are still fakes which can be sniffed out, tunes which don't feel right, CGI which looks off, but it seems as though the range of possible accidents is being steadily reduced and there aren't as many 'wrong turns' to take. That, or things move so quickly there isn't the time to explore or even identify them.

 

[mvuent]

it feels to me as if the past is becoming more like a sandbox. the illusion of the past being a fixed sequence of images is slowly being replaced by the illusion that it’s something you can step into and play with.

the dream of moment-capture tech so detailed it becomes a sort of cheat method of time travel has been around for a while. for example, there’s that much-derided scene in blade runner where deckard’s computer “enhances” a photo way beyond what should be possible. imo, rather than being a flaw, the surrealism, the impossible curiosity fulfillment of the scene makes it haunting.



or to go even further back, in mars by 1980 david stubbs mentions some audio recording pioneer who became obsessed with the idea of a machine that could pick up infinitesimal echoes of long lost sounds: conversations held in your living room 50 years ago, or in abandoned ruins 2000 years ago.

but in the past few decades there’s been an increase in both “total recall” ephemerality-capture and simulation power. the two blur together, especially with machine learning. and maybe that’s creating a kind of feedback loop. watching a commercial break aired in 1969, listening to a jungle track that could’ve come out in 1995, committing a train robbery in a virtual wild west, making deepfake presidents rap nwa lyrics - maybe all these possibilities come from the dream of time travel, but also intensify the dream by making the past feel more and more alive.

so i guess as boring and unimaginative as near-perfect mimicry can feel on a case-by-case level, i wonder if in the aggregate there's something exciting about the subconscious temporal confusion it can create...

 

[Corpsey]

Not sure how relevant this is but I find it interesting that if I know that nobody was behind a piece of art, I instantly will devalue it.

Similarly, if I know a painting is a very good copy of an original painting by somebody, I don't value it as much, other than (as with the AI art) a clever technical feat.

I guess if you didn't know that a piece of music was by an AI it could still be your favourite tune (in fact, some people might value it MORE because it's 'inhuman'), but I think it's interesting that it matters to us whether or not music/art is made by a specific person, and a specific person who had an original/unique conception... (Although ofc every piece of art is influenced by other pieces of art, nothing is entirely original...)

re: the 'representation' thing, I think that brings in an area of art history where you get photorealistic painting and drawing vs. a type of art that doesn't represent anything so much as the individual sensibility of a singular artist

 

[mixed_biscuits]

A key question is "What's the appeal of simulation?". Why do we want to copy things? What do we get out of it?

More of the stuff we like.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

digital technology makes it so easy

What makes it seem easy is that much dance music is very basic, but even then it can be difficult to pull it off e.g. the pastiches of jungle and 93 darkcore are more successful because the genres drew on a reasonably restricted range of possible creative choices compared to 91-92 rave, in which the sounds are even easier to make by tech but the greater aesthetic range shows up the copyists failure to mimic the mindset of the time that made such-and-such creative choice over some other one.

When it comes to dance music made by musical and original minds one comes up against an almost complete lack of effective mimics e.g. of Orbital, 808 State, Aphex Twin, KLF, The Prodigy's operatic rave. Those guys started from a template themselves but very quickly came up with a distinctive sound. It's also those artists who are much more likely to meet with popular success, as if they were emissaries from the common man's mind returning with what was of interest in their starting point genre and elaborating on it creatively.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Even when the range of creative options is more limited the best guys succeed because they limit the options even further, forcing an authentic sound by default e.g. Phineas II uses hardware of the time and Tim Reaper uses a modern DAW but with samples from records of the time almost exclusively.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Genres themselves include an ethos of replicability: generic dance music shouldn't stray too far from its nearest template because it would undermine the genre and its supporting DJ culture, punk music can't be too complicated because then it wouldn't be a DIY genre.

I guess the luminaries I mentioned above are auteurs in that they are loyal to themselves above genre. They are perfectly capable of successful imitation but their instincts lead them from that almost immediately. They are distinct from artists in that they are not only uniquely creative but also against an ethos of reproduction and of genre. The auteur ethos leads them also to make music which is very hard to pastiche or to turn into a genre. When they come up with something which could spawn a genre they don't do enough of it to catch on e.g. Aphex's flighty experimentation or 808 State's short-lived elevator techno jazz.

Next we have the artists who are not against genre. These are also capable of churning out generic product but inevitably add their own spin and also may intentionally produce enough of a new take to kickstart a new genre. This is most evident when a new genre is musically more difficult than its inspiration e.g. Neuro spawned from Techstep because a handful of artists decided to raise the bar.

Then the artisans who are competent enough to keep a genre going but have no artistic flair to build on it, neither away nor up e.g. the vast majority of dance music producers.

Then we have the posited class of copyists who fail to copy but produce a new genre. By the above I think these would be artists with deficient artisanal skills. A deficient artisan would not be up to the creative task, they would just make bad copies with nothing emulable.

I hope that clears things up.

 

[dilbert1]

That all makes sense to me @mixed_biscuits but of course it won’t be complete until Third drops an epic dismissive rebuttal

 

[version]

More of the stuff we like.

Why the desire for the copy when you already have the original? Is the original not satisfying enough? Is it diminished over time and has to be replenished by being reproduced?

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Why the desire for the copy when you already have the original? Is the original not satisfying enough? Is it diminished over time and has to be replenished by being reproduced?

We're not talking about exact copies. They are more of the same sort of thing. That's the whole principle behind genre: that one can bear to have more than one track with roughly the same characteristics.