[Rumori] William Gibson

[king wilson]

a great speech that W. Gibson (of Neuromancer fame) gave to the 
Director's Guild of America, May 17, 2003...


The story of film begins around a fire, in darkness. Gathered around 
this fire are primates of a certain species, our ancestors, an animal 
distinguished by a peculiar ability to recognize patterns.

There is movement in the fire: embers glow and crawl on charcoal. Fire 
looks like nothing else. It generates light in darkness. It moves. It 
is alive.

The surrounding forest is dark. Is it the same forest our ancestors 
know by day? They can’t be sure. At night it is another place, perhaps 
no place at all. The abode of the dead, of gods and demons and that 
which walks without a face. It is the self turned inside out. Without 
form, it is that on which our ancestors project the patterns their 
interestingly mutated brains generate.

This patterning-reading mutation is crucial to the survival of a 
species that must ceaselessly hunt, ceaselessly gather. One plant is 
good to eat; it grows in summer in these lowlands. But if you eat its 
seedpods, you sicken and die. The big, slow-moving river-animal can be 
surprised and killed, here in these shallows, but will escape in deeper 
water.

This function is already so central, in our ancestors, that they 
discover the outlines of the water-animal in clouds. They see the faces 
of wolves and of their own dead in the flames. They are already capable 
of symbolic thought. Spoken language is long since a fact for them but 
written language has not yet evolved. They scribe crisscross patterns 
on approximately rectangular bits of ocher, currently the world’s 
oldest known human art.

They crouch, watching the fire, watching its constant, unpredictable 
movements, and someone is telling a story. In the watching of the fire 
and the telling of the tale lie the beginning of what we still call 
film.

Later, on some other night, uncounted generations up the timeline, 
their descendants squat deep in caves, places of eternal night -- 
painting. They paint by the less restless light of reeds and tallow. 
They paint the wolves and the water-animal, the gods and their dead. 
They have found ways to take control of certain aspects of the 
cooking-fire universe. Darkness lives here, in the caves; you needn’t 
wait for dusk. The reeds and tallow throw a steadier light. Something 
is being turned inside out, here, for the first time: the pictures in 
the patterning brain are being projected, rendered. Our more recent 
ancestors will discover these stone screens, their images still 
expressing life and movement, and marvel at them, and not so long 
before the first moving images are projected.

What we call “media” were originally called “mass media”. technologies 
allowing the replication of passive experience. As a novelist, I work 
in the oldest mass medium, the printed word. The book has been largely 
unchanged for centuries. Working in language expressed as a system of 
marks on a surface, I can induce extremely complex experiences, but 
only in an audience elaborately educated to experience this. This 
platform still possesses certain inherent advantages. I can, for 
instance, render interiority of character with an ease and specificity  
denied to a screenwriter. But my audience must be literate, must know 
what prose fiction is and understand how one accesses it. This requires 
a complexly cultural education, and a certain socio-economic basis. Not 
everyone is afforded the luxury of such an education.

But I remember being taken to my first film, either a Disney animation 
or a Disney nature documentary (I can’t recall which I saw first) and 
being overwhelmed by the steep yet almost instantaneous learning curve: 
in that hour, I learned to watch film. Was taught, in effect, by the 
film itself. I was years away from being able to read my first novel, 
and would need a lot of pedagogy, to do that. But film itself taught 
me, in the dark, to view it. I remember it as a sort of violence done 
to me, as full of terror as it was of delight. But when I emerged from 
that theater, I knew how to watch film.

What had happened to me was historically the result of an immensely 
complex technological evolution, encompassing optics, mechanics, 
photography, audio recording, and much else. Whatever film it was that 
I first watched, other people around the world were also watching, 
having approximately the same experience in terms of sensory input. And 
that film no doubt survives today, in Disney’s back-catalog, as an 
experience that can still be accessed.

That survival, I think, is part of the key to understanding where the 
digital may be taking us. In terms of most of our life so far, as a 
species, it’s not a natural thing to see the dead, or hear their 
voices. I believe the significance of that is still far from being 
understood. We can actually see what life, at least in some very basic 
sense, was like, one hundred years ago. We can watch a silent movie, 
and not only see people who are long dead, but see people who were in 
their seventies and eighties in the 1920s, and who therefore bore the 
affect of their developing years -- i.e., from before the Civil War, 
and earlier. It is as if in 1956 we had been able to watch silent film 
of, say, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, or the various revolutions of 
1848. When the ramifications of this are really thought about, it 
becomes awesome in almost a religious sense.

Our ancestors, when they found their way to that first stone screen, 
were commencing a project so vast that it only now begins to become 
apparent: the unthinking construction of a species-wide, time-defying, 
effectively immortal prosthetic memory. Extensions of the human brain 
and nervous system, capable of surviving the death of the individual -- 
perhaps even of surviving the death of the species. The start of 
building what would become civilization, cities, cinema. Vast stone 
calendars, megalithic machines remembering the need to plant on a given 
day, to sacrifice on another.

With the advent of the digital, which I would date from, approximately, 
World War Two, the nature of this project begins to become more 
apparent, more overt; the texture of these more recent technologies, 
the grain of them, becomes progressively finer, progressively more 
divorced from Newtonian mechanics. In terms of scale, they are more 
akin to the workings of the brain itself.

All us, creators or audience, have participated in the change so far. 
It’s been something many of us haven’t yet gotten a handle on. We are 
too much of it to see it. It may be that we never do get a handle on 
it, as the general rate of technological innovation shows no indication 
of slowing.

Much of history has been, often to an unrecognized degree, 
technologically driven. From the extinction of North America’s 
mega-fauna to the current geopolitical significance of the Middle East, 
technology has driven change. (That’s spear-hunting technology for the 
mega-fauna and the internal-combustion engine for the Middle East, by 
the way.) Very seldom do nations legislate the emergence of new 
technologies.

The Internet, an unprecedented driver of change, was a complete 
accident, and that seems more often the way of things. The Internet is 
the result of the unlikely marriage of a DARPA project and the nascent 
industry of desktop computing. Had nations better understood the 
potential of the Internet, I suspect they might well have strangled it 
in its cradle. Emergent technology is, by its very nature, out of 
control, and leads to unpredictable outcomes.

As indeed does the emergent realm of the digital. I prefer to view this 
not as the advent of some new and extraordinary weirdness, but as part 
of the ongoing manifestation of some very ancient and extraordinary 
weirdness: our gradual spinning of a sort of extended prosthetic mass 
nervous-system, out of some urge that was present around the 
cooking-fires of our earliest human ancestors.

We call film “film” today in much the same way we “dial” phones, the 
actual dials being long gone. The fact that we do still employ actual 
film, in the traditional sense, seems an artifact of 
platform-transition and industrial economics. I tend to take arguments 
for the innate esthetic superiority of “film”, with the same grain of 
salt I reserve for arguments for the innate esthetic superiority of 
vinyl. Whatever the current shortcomings of the digital image, I 
imagine there will be digital ways around them.

But I need to diverge here into another industry, one that’s already 
and even more fully feeling the historical impact of the digital: 
music. Prior to the technology of audio recording, there was relatively 
little one could do to make serious money with music. Musicians could 
perform for money, and the printing press had given rise to an industry 
in sheet music, but great fame, and wealth, tended to be a matter of 
patronage. The medium of the commercial audio recording changed that, 
and created industry predicated on an inherent technological monopoly 
of the means of production. Ordinary citizens could neither make nor 
manufacture audio recordings. That monopoly has now ended. Some 
futurists, looking at the individual musician’s role in the realm of 
the digital, have suggested that we are in fact heading for a new 
version of the previous situation, one in which patronage (likely 
corporate, and non-profit) will eventually become a musician’s only 
potential ticket to relative fame and wealth. The window, then, in 
which one could become the Beatles, occupy that sort of market 
position, is seen to have been technologically determined. And 
technologically finite. The means of production, reproduction and 
distribution of recorded music, are today entirely digital, and thus 
are in the hands of whoever might desire them. We get them for free, 
often without asking for them, as inbuilt peripherals. I bring music 
up, here, and the impact the digital is having on it, mainly as an 
example of the unpredictable nature of technologically driven change. 
It may well be that the digital will eventually negate the underlying 
business-model of popular musical stardom entirely. If this happens, it 
will be a change which absolutely no one intended, and few anticipated, 
and not the result of any one emergent technology, but of a complex 
interaction between several. You can see the difference if you compare 
the music industry’s initial outcry against “home taping” with the 
situation today.

Whatever changes will come for film will be as unpredictable and as 
ongoing, but issues of intellectual property and piracy may ultimately 
be the least of them. The music industry’s product is, for want of a 
better way to put it, a relatively simple, relatively traditional 
product. Audio recordings just aren’t that technology-heavy. Though 
there’s one aspect of the digital’s impact on music that’s absolutely 
central to film: sampling. Sampling music is possible because the 
end-consumer of the product is now in possession of technologies equal 
or even superior to the technologies involved in producing that 
product. Human capital (that is, talent) aside, all the 
end-consumer-slash-creator lacks today, in comparison to a 
music-marketing conglomerate, is the funds required to promote product. 
The business of popular music, today, is now, in some peculiarly new 
way, entirely about promotion.

Film, I imagine, is in for a different sort of ride up the timeline, 
primarily owing to the technology-intensive nature of today’s product. 
Terminator III Unplugged is a contradiction in terms. Hollywood is 
massively and multiply plugged, and is itself a driver of new 
technologies. The monopoly on the means of production (at least in 
terms of creation) can be preserved, in this environment, as the 
industry itself operates on something very near the cutting edge of 
emergent technology. For a while, at least.

In terms of the future, however, the history of recorded music suggests 
that any film made today is being launched up the timeline toward 
end-user technologies ultimately more intelligent, more capable, than 
the technologies employed in the creation of that film.

Which is to say that, no matter who you are, nor how pure your artistic 
intentions, nor what your budget was, your product, somewhere up the 
line, will eventually find itself at the mercy of people whose ordinary 
civilian computational capacity outstrips anything anyone has access to 
today.

Remember the debate around the ethics of colorizing films shot in 
black-and-white? Colorization, up the line, is a preference setting. 
Probably the default setting, as shipped from the factory.

I imagine that one of the things our great-grandchildren will find 
quaintest about us is how we had all these different, function-specific 
devices. Their fridges will remind them of appointments and the trunks 
of their cars will, if need be, keep the groceries from thawing. The 
environment itself will be smart, rather than various function-specific 
nodes scattered through it. Genuinely ubiquitous computing spreads like 
warm Vaseline. Genuinely evolved interfaces are transparent, so 
transparent as to be invisible.

This spreading, melting, flowing together of what once were distinct 
and separate media, that’s where I imagine we’re headed. Any linear 
narrative film, for instance, can serve as the armature for what we 
would think of as a virtual reality, but which Johnny X, eight-year-old 
end-point consumer, up the line, thinks of as how he looks at stuff. If 
he discovers, say, Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, he might idly 
pause to allow his avatar a freestyle Hong Kong kick-fest with the 
German guards in the prison camp. Just because he can. Because he’s 
always been able to. He doesn’t think about these things. He probably 
doesn’t fully understand that that hasn’t always been possible. He 
doesn’t know that you weren’t always able to explore the sets 
virtually, see them from any angle, or that you couldn’t open doors and 
enter rooms that never actually appeared in the original film.

Or maybe, if his attention span wavers, he’ll opt to experience the 
film as if shot from the POV of that baseball that McQueen keeps 
tossing.

Somewhere in the countless preferences in Johnny’s system there’s one 
that puts high-rez, highly expressive dog-heads on all of the 
characters. He doesn’t know that this setting is based on a 
once-popular Edwardian folk-motif of poker-playing dogs, but that’s 
okay; he’s not a history professor, and if he needed to know, the 
system would tell him. You get complete breed-selection, too, with the 
dog-head setting, but that was all something he enjoyed more when he 
was still a little kid.

But later in the afternoon he’s run across something called The Hours, 
and he’s not much into it at all, but then he wonders how these women 
would look if he put the dog-heads on them. And actually it’s pretty 
good, then, with the dog-heads on, so then he opts for the freestyle 
Hong Kong kick-fest…

And what has happened, here, in this scenario, is that our ancient 
project, that began back at the fire, has come full circle. The 
patterns in the heads of the ancestors have come out, over many 
millennia, and have come to inhabit, atemporally, this nameless, 
single, non-physical meta-artifact we’ve been constructing. So that 
they form an extension of Johnny’s being, and he accesses them as such, 
and takes them utterly for granted, and treats them with no more 
respect than he would the products of his own idle surmise. But he’s 
still a child, Johnny, and swims unknowing in this, his culture and the 
culture of his species. He’ll be educated (likely via this same system 
he plays with now, in a more pedagogical mode -- and likely, without 
his knowing, it’s already doing that, in background as it were). It may 
be that he’ll have to be taught to watch films, in the way that we 
watch them (or watched them, as I think DVD’s are already changing 
that, not to mention changing the way you approach making them). He may 
need something akin to the sort of education that I needed in order to 
read novels -- to appreciate, as it were, a marginalized but still 
powerfully viable media-platform.

I can only trust that Johnny’s entertainment system, and the culture 
that informs it, will be founded on solid curatorial principles. That 
there will be an ongoing archaeology of media-product in place to 
insure that someone or something is always there to categorically 
state, and if necessary to prove, that The Maltese Falcon was shot in 
black and white and originally starred Humphrey Bogart.

Because I see Johnny falling asleep now in his darkened bedroom, and 
atop the heirloom Ikea bureau, the one that belonged to his 
grandmother, which his mother has recently had restored, there is a 
freshly-extruded resin action-figure, another instantaneous product of 
Johnny’s entertainment system.

It is a woman, posed balletically, as if in flight on John Wu wires.

It is Meryl Streep, as she appears in The Hours.

She has the head of a chihuahua.