Estou completamente fascinado por esses novos algoritmos capazes de criar arte. Ando procurando sobre o que as pessoas tem a dizer sobre isso, em minhas buscas acabei esbarrando com um vídeo dum compilado de palestras de um escritor, orador, etnobotânico, psiconauta e historiador de arte americano chamado Terence McKenna.
Os áudios são do fim dos anos 90, bem da época do começo da popularização da internet. McKenna essencialmente fala sobre o potencial da tecnologia para o ser humano tirar arte da mente dele e materializar ela no mundo real. É absolutamente surpreendente ver o quanto isso que ele está dizendo bate perfeitamente com o que essas IAs criadoras de arte estão fazendo – a palestra é de 20 e poucos anos atrás, mas poderia ser de ontem.
Aliás, dá para ir até além na previsão dele, em certos momentos McKenna brinca com a ideia de uma tecnologia ainda mais avançada, embora não diga com todas as palavras, ele flerta até com a ideia mundos virtuais, quase que num sentido literal “daquilo”, como uma realidade virtual imersiva, tal como no clássico episódio San Junipero de Black Mirror.
McKenna nasceu em 1946 e veio a falecer em 3 de Abril de 2000, injustamente presenciando apenas o início da popularização da internet, mas mesmo assim foi capaz de vislumbrar precisamente o futuro, não só de 2022, mas possivelmente até além disso.
Textos:
Source: Future of Art – Terence McKenna
[…]There’s more art in my head Joe Ordinary than there is in half the museums on this planet. Well how, then—what’s maddening is how narrow the reduction valve is. You know, we’ve been making art for 5,000 years and what have we got? We’ve got a few museums full of some nice stuff. But what have we got in our heads? 50,000 times more good stuff, but very hard to get out. And really hard to get out when you’re carving it in diorite and granite.
But somehow this barrier between us and these realms of art—you don’t even have to talk philosophy; you don’t have to call it the Platonic realm of ideas or some higher imperium, you just have to say beauty: there’s a great deal of beauty on the other side of this tiny keyhole that we’re looking through. And if technology gives us a way to open the door and all waltz through dancing, it seems to me that would be a spiritual renaissance. That what happens at a spiritual renaissance is: by some means the collective soul becomes collectively known. Like, in the Italian Renaissance, the invention of oil painting allowed great geniuses to portray the major themes moving in the archetypal unconscious of their patrons and the populations who viewed their paintings and themselves. And it’s a shared epiphany, it’s a spiritual quest, it’s a group transformation. But it’s driven by and led by the revelation of art.
I hope I live to see the day. I mean, I don’t know about downloading consciousness into a machine. What I would be able to die happy with is a technology that could capture just a snapshot or a film clip of one’s thoughts. So, you know, you would rig up on DMT or psilocybin or something, and when you really got into the good stuff you’d hit the record button and have it. And then you could come back down with it and model it and adumbrate it and move it around, edit it, explore, unpack certain parts of it.
My god, the power of art that could be created that way! And again, it’s ordinary people, I’m convinced. It’s not—what genius is, is the ability to bring it back, not the ability to encounter it. Every single one of us can encounter it. And that’s very telling—and almost an argument for our divinity, because here we are at the end of some long Darwinian evolutionary tree of winnowing so that all we have are what we need, and yet, apparently, one of the things we need is an ocean of alien beauty just right behind your eyebrows. It seems to me, if that’s something we must have in our toolkit, then someone with greater intelligence than us must know a lot more than we do about the journey we’re making. […]
Source: Spirituality and Technology
[…]The ultimate result of all this electronic technology is the literalizing of consciousness: that consciousness is coming into being. That’s why, you know—the 19th century had no industry equivalent to Hollywood. And Hollywood is a huge sector of the national economy, and what is it concerned with? It builds dreams, it peddles images. It’s entirely involved in the production of the imagination.
And think of a company like Industrial Light and Magic: they’re not kidding! And when you look at their corporate ledger you understand they’re not kidding, and wish you had stock in it because Industrial Light and Magic is making very real money. So I think that all of these technologies and the psychedelic shamanism and the emphasis on a vocabulary of spiritualism and direct experience—that what this all leading to is the greatest empowering of the imagination since the birth of language, and that the effects are similarly unpredictable. I mean, who could’ve imagined, sitting around the paleolithic campfire, that “ugg-nug” meant “water” would lead to the World Trade Center, you know, in a direct line of development? But the thing is that it’s happening faster than any straight person can anticipate.
Somebody not presently in the room brought me a book called Metaman, and it looks very far out. It says the coming evolution of the human-machine intelligence, and it shows a picture of Europe with all these lights going everywhere. Well, when you open it up and read it it has phrases in it like, “within several decades human beings will this and that”—no, there aren’t several decades. This is far closer than you wish to suppose. It is essentially upon us.
What is impeding our recognition of it is the presence of so much momentum in the system from the old way of doing things. I mean, for instance, what we are doing at this moment is incredibly unnecessary and archaic. And we do it because it’s how we’ve always done it: gather together and talk. But, you know, Tim Leary had a wonderful saying back in the sixties; he said, “Find the others.” Find the others. Well, if you go onto the net, no matter what your concern is—you know, the restoration of south German harpsichords, or whatever it is—there are hundreds of people waiting to share their secrets with you, to passionately communicate with you, to draw you into a community. The net is a tremendous permission for eccentricity.
You know, if you’re a 245-pound white male and you want to present yourself as a seven-year-old black girl who’s made a great victory over polio—hey, nobody can stop you from doing that on the net. On the net you are who you say you are. And all interest groups, no matter how peculiar and formerly insulated, can contact each other instantly. So the idea, the very notion, of orthodoxy is melting away. Freakery is the wave of the future. The bohemians knew it, the ’pataphysicians knew it, the dadaists knew it, the surrealists knew it, the hippies, even the zippies. Eccentricity and the empowerment of individuality is a paradoxical part of living in an electronic collectivity[…]
Source: Interview with Erik Davis
[…]Everything is happening right on time, right on schedule. I mean, this is the thing that, if you believe knowledge is power—which I certainly do—then the Internet is the dispensation. The angels have landed, the aliens have unfurled their banner on this planet. And now let’s see if information can liberate.
That’s why I don’t want to do something stupid like die and miss the whole unfoldment of this proposition that knowledge is power, information will liberate. And it will be settled in the next ten or fifteen years. Either they’ll get a handle on it—whoever “they” are, whatever “a handle” means—or it will slip from their control and it will be clear that some kind of dialogue is now going on between individual human beings and the sum-total of human knowledge, and that nothing can stop it. That some kind of Renaissance, some kind of total new relationship to knowledge and possibility is put in place[…]san
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