Wagging the digital dog

The robots have taken the city,

the smoke.

You cannot pick up a paper or a magazine these days without reading about how technology of one kind or another continues to improve our lives, to invest every mortal occasion with increased profit or ease. There’s little we need to do in our brave new global world that hasn’t been electronically refined or digitally enhanced, is more environmentally inoffensive, more user-friendly.

In a fashionable catchphrase, it is always time to move on; in our headlong rush forward there is no moment allowed for pause, for reflection, for taking stock. Like the technology that pervades our lives, we must continually seek betterment, offer more options and features to each other: be more like our cellphones?

I am writing this column using a sort of super-electric typewriter called a word processor. This gives me the facility to chop and change, to re-voice the clumsy phrase, to tinker to my heart’s delight. When I have finished, I will press a few keys and, in an instant, the column will be reproduced at the other end of the country.

There’s nothing to complain about when it comes to that sort of facility. The only penalty is when the technology so fascinates the human that the human loses control. Endless tinkering often displaces the enthusiasms of the mind. At the University of Cape Town college of music the invaluable musicologist, Gunther Pulvermacher, told a story about how Mendelssohn studied an original Beethoven orchestral score. In Beethoven’s day blank scorepaper was expensive and so, when he wanted to change something, Beethoven would take little strips of score, make the alterations and then paste these over the originals. Examining one of the scores, Mendelssohn found that in a passage for the cellos, Beethoven had changed and pasted about 10 times. So he patiently steamed off the alterations, numbering them, hoping for some insight into the workings of the genius mind.

What he did find was that Beethoven had explored nine variations of the original passage, taken a circular inventive tour, which brought him back to what he’d first written. The first and last versions of passage were exactly the same. That there was a lesson in Pulvermacher’s lecture about the dangers of tampering too much with artistic inspiration, is in no doubt. Pasting strips of revised passages on to scores was Beethoven’s technology, his music processor. And it got in the way.

All of which is a long introduction to some reflections on how a particular branch of current technology has quite overwhelmed, seems actually to have turned viciously on its practitioners. This is what has happened to today’s visual arts, film and television — most particularly the latter — where the advent of digital editing technology has become an electronic brute out of control.

To watch the television coverage of last Friday’s imaginative opening ceremony of the World Cup Rugby tournament was to witness an almost terrifying display of gimmicky televisual busy-ness. The entire ceremony was hostage to the vision mixers, a restless flaunting of every trick in the book. One of the featured items in the ceremony was the playing, with breathtaking virtuosity, of Australian folk themes, arranged for violin and button accordion. All this required was that a camera dwelt on the two musicians, with perhaps a close-up here and there. The music and its thrilling performance were what should have been paramount. Not so for the television director, who instead used the two minutes for his own fuss of visual pyrotechnics. He had cameras swirling and swooping, bouncing and circling the players, zooming and shifting, seemingly intent on distraction, interference.

Why? Is brilliantly performed music no longer considered capable of holding its own? Must everything be adorned with trickery? Or is it that the availability of ‘instant” technology has supervened, become of primary importance? Today’s ‘editing boxes”, the Flames and the Avids plus all the rest of them, are to their users like a new box of paints to a child. They are there, so let’s splash them around.

Of today’s broadcasters, the BBC is among the worst offenders. Over weekends the international service, BBC World, broadcasts some interesting documentaries, many of them offering insights into the sciences. In most cases these are so distorted, so corkscrewed by visual fiddle-faddle as to be unwatchable. When an expert explains some fact or phenomenon he is bathed in violet light, superimposed on a background of antic luminous images — in fact everything possible is done to distract the viewer from absorbing what’s being said. To the visual add the contingent intrusions of sound effects and synthesised music, and the whole thing is unpalatable. It’s like being forced to ingest the soup, the fish, the meat, the trifle and the wine all from one spoon.

I am sure I will be deemed an old fogey for making these complaints. I’m more than happy to fill any role that insists that, like piped music, television’s visual corruptions are trespasses on human liberty and choice.