What Else is New?

avatat-websiteWe live in an exciting time. Watches are phones. Phones are computers. Ben Affleck is Batman. No matter where you look in the world of arts or technology, everything is new, and new is good. In fact, we make such a big deal out of anything new, whether it’s Avatar in 3D or Jay Z giving out a million free copies of his album (or, indeed, Jay Z dropping the hyphen from his name), that we lose perspective on art itself. Is striving for newness really that important?

Let’s be honest, most of the time when we talk about something being new, it isn’t. At best, it’s a development or continuation of something that came beforehand. The Matrix, for example, saw the Wachowskis create a stew of philosophy, one part Judeo-Christian tradition and Western literature, two parts Eastern religious thought and anime. When Radiohead released In Rainbows, letting people pay however much they wanted, they were simply popularising a long-existing pricing model. In the end, neither Keanu Reeves nor Thom Yorke invented the wheel; they just bolted on an engine and added an ostentatious bumper sticker.

But there’s nothing wrong with that. We tend to like wheels that are hooked up to engines. Sure, we’re constantly exaggerating how new and original our favourite artists are, but that doesn’t negate what they’re producing. There are critics out there that complain that Inception is merely a rip-off of the Japanese film Paprika. While that might arguably be the case, Inception did open up a whole new world to an audience that was not necessarily familiar with the Japanese counterpart. It might not have been entirely new, but it did influence popular culture in ways Paprika could only dream of. Yes, there is a terrible Inception joke in there somewhere.

So is there any point in trying to achieve newness if experience shows it’s nearly impossible? If it’s newness for the sake of newness, no. If artists are looking to create something timeless, focusing on making it new will only date it later on. Let’s look back at The Matrix. On the one hand, visually, the film did things that very few had done before, and the term “revolutionary” was thrown around without hesitation. But that’s not why we remember it over a decade later. We remember it because, at its heart, it was a story about self-discovery, overcoming hardships, and finding love. It was a movie that appealed to our humanity and posed questions about our existence. In short, it was a great film. If we stripped away everything that was “new” and “revolutionary,” it would still have been a fantastic story.

If, however, the film had been a montage of action sequences that pushed the visual boundaries of cinema for two hours straight, there would be nothing timeless about it. In a few years, someone would come along and make something even more modern, and we’d no longer find it relevant in any way. That’s why the original Matrix is something of a modern classic and its sequels are often relegated to an unfortunate footnote. And that’s why Avatar, after the awe of seeing it in IMAX wears off, gets described as a remake of Pocahontas with more aliens and a strong emphasis on obtaining ‘unobtanium’.

While newness for its own sake is generally a terrible idea, when done correctly, innovation can enhance the experience of art stupendously. Take The Dark Knight; it’s a terrific adaptation of various incarnations of Batman, and as a film, it’s enjoyable whether you’re watching it in a cinema, on your laptop, or on a black and white TV with your great-grandparents. Seeing it in IMAX, however, is the pinnacle of that experience. Christopher Nolan’s decision to shoot an unprecedented amount of footage (for an action film) in IMAX lends itself to the scale and sheer spectacle that The Dark Knight was aiming for. It wasn’t an entirely new concept by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a step forward and created a more immersive experience for cinema-goers.

Music does this constantly. Every so often, new genres evolve that resonate with certain groups of people in a way that other music hasn’t. When Black Sabbath released their eponymous debut album and, to a greater extent, their follow-up Paranoid, they didn’t single-handedly build heavy metal from scratch. Other bands were experimenting with similar sounds and influences at the same time, but Ozzy Osbourne and his band put together records that went on to influence hundreds of bands and millions of fans. Their brand of heavy metal wasn’t just new; it was new and it meant something to their listeners. And that’s why people still listen to those albums forty years on, even if they’re not particularly revolutionary anymore.

In fact, a lot of people these days wouldn’t even think of listening to Black Sabbath were it not for the Internet and its impact on music. My iTunes library is what it is today largely because of what the Internet has let me discover. With artists embracing services like Spotify or Pandora, uploading videos to YouTube, and posting albums to Soundcloud or a whole horde of sites that host free mix tapes, millions more are able to listen to and even participate in their musical output. The fact that there is a forum available for every niche genre out there is a testament to how the Internet can bring listeners closer to music in every form. We discover it, we download it, we buy it, we consume it, we discuss it, and we make it. The Internet has given a greater platform to both the artist and the fan, and we’re better off because of it.

And, as most fans of any TV show now know, pushing for innovation has led to better television in a better package. In a recent article in Newsweek, Vince Gilligan, supreme overlord of the fan favourite cum possible cult that is Breaking Bad, explained that twenty years ago, fans of TV shows only saw, on average, one in every four episodes. Producers and writers were forced to structure shows that were very episodic; every episode had its own plot and viewers easily understood what was happening without having to watch the rest of the show. It made for easily-consumable TV that was a perfect accompaniment to a microwave dinner for one, but it lacked development and continuity.

With the advent of DVD boxsets, TiVo, and now Netflix, writers for television know that they can serialise their projects. They can make dynamic, complex characters with long story arcs that span whole seasons. They know fans have easy access to every episode and can still remember where the show previously left off.

True, there are plenty of critically-acclaimed shows, especially sitcoms and crime dramas, that still retain a classic episode-centric structure. They’re shows that work well with those constraints. Fortunately, though, not every show has to restrict itself like that anymore, and as a result, we now have iconic characters such as Walter White, Tony Soprano, and Omar Little. The pursuit of innovation complemented the evolution of TV impeccably without overshadowing its actual content, which is what everyone striving for newness in the arts should be doing.

So, for better or worse, what IS new in the arts world, and crucially, what can we expect to see in the future? What high tech gizmos and tomorrow’s world-esque gadgets will shape our experiences of film, TV, music, books, video games and theatre? Well, we may be a long way from time travel and teleportation, but in the liberal arts, there’s certainly a fair amount to get excited about.
In a recent article for Tribeca Film, Andrei Severny grandiosely proclaimed that “The Movie Theatre of the Future Will Be In Your Mind”. Certainly a dramatic statement, but of course he is a film journalist, and therefore it’s altogether likely that initial statement will be mostly sound bite hyperbole.

So is that true? Well, yes, of course. What does stuff like “Theme Park of the Mind” even really mean in a quantifiable sense? But that doesn’t stop the futuristic goodies in the article from being any less exciting.
In Yokohoma, Japan, Orbi, a first of its kind high-tech cinema has recently opened to the general public. Its technology combines the work of SEGA, the company that brought you Sonic the Hedgehog, and content from BBC Earth, feared stomping ground of the ethereal deity of nature television, Sir David Attenborough.

This epic scale cinema, with a screen of 131×26 ft. aims to give the viewer a immersive, multi-sensory experience of nature, exploring animals and plants through sight, smell, touch and sound. Cool right?
This new super cinema shows a real concerted effort by the movie theatre industry to compete with their growing competition in guises TV, tablet and smart phone.

Moving on from that, there is now a wider discussion of the possibility of a seamless merging of the world of the film and the world of the viewer, the real and projected worlds coming together. This, many believe will lead to a total feeling of being “in” a film. There’s talk of a merging of gaming and movies, of flexible screens, motion controls, haptic – or tactile technology, smart glasses, virtual and augmented reality. No, it doesn’t make that much sense to us either, but it all sounds pretty exciting.

This science fiction-esque tale of the possible future of Cinema is of course framed as part of a wider debate on the effects of new modes of technology on the future of arts, a key talking point for anyone seriously studying this issue, and indeed the theme will feature strongly throughout the rest of this article. Cinema and film in general, like all other areas of the arts are seemingly losing ground and finding themselves under attack from the major technological advancements of the 21st century.

The growth of the internet, of smart phones and tablets and other such handheld equipment. This seems to create a faintly Cyber-Punk narrative so popular amongst satirists and doom-mongering journalists, that the arts as we know them may be about to change forever; that eventually CD shops will die out, that television channels will cease to exist and that all our cinemas will close.

Responses like this from the cinema industry aim to show that this won’t happen. They seek to prove that they plan to evolve, to compete, to offer cinema-goers a unique experience they couldn’t get on their ipad or laptop. So in many ways, maybe, just maybe, the threats posed to our traditional arts institutions by new technology could serve as a good thing, creating an environment of competition which forces the old guard to change and adapt, and provide us with ever greater and more enjoyable experiences.

Looking past cinema, whose jargon fuelled pronouncements about their future could take up the rest of this article, the world of music has also been going through an agreeably more understated, but far more tangible revolution than the one being loftily prophesied by Mr. Severny and co. in the cinematic world. Streaming has been an ever growing beast these past few years, not just in music but in film, TV and gaming too.
However, it’s in music that its roots truly lie, and it’s in the music industry that its effects will likely be the most visible in the coming years. There is no doubt that the CD industry has been forced to yield considerable ground over the last decade to online streaming. No doubt there will always be a small market for owning a physical copy of music. But it’s likely streaming will be here to stay as the way the overwhelming majority of people access music.

Recent developments see the partnership of streaming service Radio and Cumulus Media, in a move which many commentators feel will allow smaller services like Rdio to compete with larger and more established organisations such as Spotify and Pandora. News such as the formation of these partnerships, and moves within the streaming industry seem to establish a pattern, that the battleground in the music industry is no longer between the streaming sites and the High Street, but that the streaming world has grown to the point where it is now a fully-fledged industry in its own right, battling and competing with itself. This, we can only hope, will lead to further advancements in streaming, a better service and perhaps even more innovation to the way we buy and listen to music.

Video gaming, like film and music, has similarly seen online challenges to its traditional means of distribution. But in this case, platforms like Steam and opportunities to buy games on Xbox Live pose little threat to developers, at least in comparison to other industries. Due to the vast popularity of console gaming, they aren’t particularly worrying video game stores on the high street, who are still doing steady business, supplemented by their online stores.

In gaming then, the pie is probably big enough for everyone (video games in the US totalled 14.8 billion last year, of which 8.8 was physical console sales, a 21% decrease, but still sizeable enough). This however, does not mean that the gaming industry is not competitive. Quite the opposite, it’s a proverbial shark tank for games and console developers alike. For this and other reasons, it’s in games where we tend to see the starkest advancements in technology and quality of experience. So what do we predict for video gaming in the future?
Well, aside from the next generation of consoles, of which we know little as of yet, and the release of GTA V, which many see as a harbinger of what the future of gaming can achieve, we can see video gaming going down a more social, casual route. With all of the major console developers now taking up the ethos behind the admittedly one-trick pony that was the Nintendo Wii, a canny move by a developer that couldn’t hope to compete financially with the ‘Big Two’.

Games are seen to be growing up, and while a significant earner in the industry will always be the teenage boy shoot-em-up demographic a la Call of Duty, video games now provide the sort of fun family, post-Christmas dinner entertainment that would have previously been taken up by Monopoly or watching The Great Escape. Video Games are also getting intellectual, with their interactive nature piquing the interest of many great writers and the like. Some observers have gone so far as to name video games ‘The future of storytelling’, and when summer blockbuster season rolls around once again, sometimes it’s not so difficult to believe them.

In the end, as we mentioned earlier, it’s unlikely that the world of the future will be any more than a continuation of the present. Andrei Severny’s theme parks of the mind aside, it’s likely that in 50 years you will still be able to buy a CD on your high street, that cinema will still exist in some shape or form, that you will still be greeted by the familiar site of someone reading a paperback on the tube.
Our personal prediction for the future, at least where the arts is concerned is a world of choice and ease of access for the masses to a wide variety of different and innovative means of enjoying the arts, and frankly, we’re rather looking forward to it.