By Charles Roy
Tekne-cality
A few weeks ago I found myself in a lively discussion with a pair of gifted engineers from MIT who’d recently seen the ABBA Voyages hologram show playing in London. Like millions of others, they were awed by the holographic effect they’d witnessed and were curious about the technology behind it.
As the card-carrying artist in the group, I was happy to report that the show isn’t a marvel of technology, but a triumph of art and creativity. They were astonished after I told them the tech is over 100 years old.
ABBA Voyages uses a type of holographic effect known as Pepper’s Ghost, which has been in popular use since the 19th century and, truth be told, it isn't really a hologram at all but a stage illusion. Pioneered by the traveling British scientist and entertainer John Henry Pepper in 1862, the illusion is created by dangling a transparent screen in front of a viewer and then reflecting a brightly lit object onto it. In the early days of Pepper’s Ghost, a theatrical set designer would position a candle-lit actor under the stage then open the trap door, so audiences could see the actor's spooky reflection in a glass window hanging above but not the actor himself. That’s it. That’s the tech. If you’ve ever looked out your window at night and seen your own reflection looking back at you then you’ve seen the Pepper’s Ghost effect in action. In the hands of a capable producer, the illusion is chilling and fun. In the case of ABBA Voyages, the images are so beautifully rendered and brightly displayed that (with a healthy dose of good ole fashioned stage craft) these Pepper’s Ghost illusions seduce the viewer into accepting as real what is purely digital.
My friends were thoroughly unconvinced.
My friends were thoroughly unconvinced.
It had to have been a feat of technology that tricked their eyes, they concluded. Not talented artists drawing on design apps and dancing with Swedes in mo-cap suits. In the great hierarchy of the ABBA Voyages production team, clearly the engineers' contributions mattered more than the artists’. By the end of our lively conversation (I’ve said ‘lively’ twice now to convey just how ‘lively’ the conversation got) we reached an uneasy detente. The artists - the visionaries behind the video content - needed the software engineers to develop the right tools, just as the engineers needed the artists to give them a vision to execute. With certain projects, we agreed, the two sides will reach across the art / technology divide to create something together that neither could achieve on their own. So we were both right.
It only occurred to me afterwards that although we were both right, we were wrong about the reason why.
It only occurred to me afterwards that although we were both right, we were wrong about the reason why.
It’s no secret that for centuries performing artists have forged close relationships with talented engineers. One can view the history of cinema as a history of artists and engineers coming together to create extraordinary things: first moving pictures, then talkies, then technicolor and so on. Further back, one can draw a straight line from the 16th C ‘machina versatilis’ of Inigo Jones to the whizz-bang high-tech wizardry of Robert Lepage or James Cameron. And even before that, there’s evidence the ancient Romans used construction machinery such as cranes to fly actors and set pieces over audience’s heads. So where is the line between art and engineering, when they've been wowing audiences hand-in-glove for two thousand years? Anybody who’s spent time in moldy rehearsal studios or years in sterile engineering labs will come away with the obvious understanding that the two camps couldn’t be more different. But yet, when you go back far enough, another little secret emerges: at one point in time, they were considered to be the exact same thing.
Prior to the Romans were the Ancient Greeks, the prolific inventors of theatre, tragedy, comedy, script writing, acting, producing...all of it. Here’s an interesting quirk about the Greeks that sets this whole topic to rights: they didn’t have different words for art and engineering. To the Greeks, the word for art was “tekne” and the word for engineering was also “tekne” - the same word which gave rise to an artist’s ‘technique’ also gave engineers their ‘technology.’
Prior to the Romans were the Ancient Greeks, the prolific inventors of theatre, tragedy, comedy, script writing, acting, producing...all of it. Here’s an interesting quirk about the Greeks that sets this whole topic to rights: they didn’t have different words for art and engineering. To the Greeks, the word for art was “tekne” and the word for engineering was also “tekne” - the same word which gave rise to an artist’s ‘technique’ also gave engineers their ‘technology.’
And what did ‘tekne’ itself mean? The application of knowledge. Whatever the knowledge happened to be, once applied, became 'tekne'.
Pencil sketches on paper, mathematical equations, a singer’s high-notes, an engineer’s motherboard… all “tekne” to the Greeks. What they understood, what we might've since forgotten, is that there is no boundary separating artists from engineers. Not only do they need each other to create extraordinary works but they're so similar that they can be called by the same name. Sure, the two camps apply different fields of knowledge, but they ultimately perform very similar tasks and arrive at the same place. Or so the Greeks would have us believe. But they weren't alone in supporting this view.
The European Renaissance produced lots of talented individuals who displayed a convergence of artistic and engineering skills. Look at Leonardo and his machines. Or Brunelleschi, the colossal genius behind Florence’s ‘Duomo’, who invented tools, machines and mathematical linear perspective in order to achieve the aesthetic result he imagined. Or Ismail al-Jazari, the brilliant 12th C. Persian artist and Father of Robotics. More recently, there was Calcutta’s S.N. Bose, who laid the mathematical foundation for quantum mechanics, collaborated with Einstein to theorize his eponymous Boson particle and was Bengal’s first translator of Tennyson. Bose aside, it's from the achievements of the Ancients that we have our contemporary word ‘Renaissance Man’ which still refers to guys like that.
Pencil sketches on paper, mathematical equations, a singer’s high-notes, an engineer’s motherboard… all “tekne” to the Greeks. What they understood, what we might've since forgotten, is that there is no boundary separating artists from engineers. Not only do they need each other to create extraordinary works but they're so similar that they can be called by the same name. Sure, the two camps apply different fields of knowledge, but they ultimately perform very similar tasks and arrive at the same place. Or so the Greeks would have us believe. But they weren't alone in supporting this view.
The European Renaissance produced lots of talented individuals who displayed a convergence of artistic and engineering skills. Look at Leonardo and his machines. Or Brunelleschi, the colossal genius behind Florence’s ‘Duomo’, who invented tools, machines and mathematical linear perspective in order to achieve the aesthetic result he imagined. Or Ismail al-Jazari, the brilliant 12th C. Persian artist and Father of Robotics. More recently, there was Calcutta’s S.N. Bose, who laid the mathematical foundation for quantum mechanics, collaborated with Einstein to theorize his eponymous Boson particle and was Bengal’s first translator of Tennyson. Bose aside, it's from the achievements of the Ancients that we have our contemporary word ‘Renaissance Man’ which still refers to guys like that.
Maybe that was true ages ago, when generalists prevailed and common-folk strove to emulate famous geniuses, but we live in an age of specialists and specialized fields. As a result, haven’t the fields of art and engineering diverged irretrievably? It’s hard to see over the silo-ing hedge that separates a designer of greeting cards from an engineer looking for efficiencies in a smelter.
But curiously enough, scratch just a little below the surface and something glaringly obvious emerges - they’re both trying to make something work.
Both artists and engineers are keenly aware that the thing they’re working on needs to function correctly, whatever it is. An artist’s painting or composition or greeting card needs to function in a certain way to achieve its aim. An engineer’s machine needs to function. Sure, we measure the outcomes differently, but thermometers and box office aside, both artists and engineers are aiming for the same goal: get the damn thing to work. The Greeks were right, but we don’t call it ‘tekne’ anymore. We call it craft.
But curiously enough, scratch just a little below the surface and something glaringly obvious emerges - they’re both trying to make something work.
Both artists and engineers are keenly aware that the thing they’re working on needs to function correctly, whatever it is. An artist’s painting or composition or greeting card needs to function in a certain way to achieve its aim. An engineer’s machine needs to function. Sure, we measure the outcomes differently, but thermometers and box office aside, both artists and engineers are aiming for the same goal: get the damn thing to work. The Greeks were right, but we don’t call it ‘tekne’ anymore. We call it craft.
Of course the ABBA hologram show is a triumph of both art and engineering because ALL shows are a triumph of art and engineering because ALL shows have to be crafted. To argue otherwise would be to commit a category mistake and invent a meaningless hierarchy among those who toil in service of craft. Our forefathers figured this out thousands of years ago and it's probably about time we remembered.
To have the last word after the lively discussion with my brilliant friends (that’s three “livelies” and, yep, it was a doozy): yes, we were both right, but only insofar as all of us were on shaky ground. Enforcing a modern gap between art and technology creates a meaningless wedge between groups who pray to the same Gods of craft and are merely tackling the same problem from two different directions.
But the fact that I spotted it first makes me a little less wrong than them.
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To have the last word after the lively discussion with my brilliant friends (that’s three “livelies” and, yep, it was a doozy): yes, we were both right, but only insofar as all of us were on shaky ground. Enforcing a modern gap between art and technology creates a meaningless wedge between groups who pray to the same Gods of craft and are merely tackling the same problem from two different directions.
But the fact that I spotted it first makes me a little less wrong than them.
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A final thought. One of the brilliant MIT engineers may or may not have been my beloved older brother, with whom I’ve been known to argue about anything for almost any reason, and I look forward with great anticipation to our next ‘lively’ discussion. :)