Technology for Artists: An Interview with Clive ompson

Oh my God, this stuff is totally coming. Its going to be awesome. In this fascinating conversation, the digital technology writer talks about the future of media as predicted by everything from pencil sharpeners to Sherlock.

In late December I interviewed Clive Thompson, author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better.

Jess Kimball: Let's get right to one of my favorite ideas from your book: on page 44 you say, Our ancestors learned how to remember, and we will learn how to forget.

Clive Thompson: I think that epiphany comes from conversations that I had with Cathy Marshall. Cathy's a researcher from Microsoft; she has spent years studying how people deal with their exploding digital archives. What do people do with it all? Ive been meaning to write a piece one of these days that's just about her work. I said, "Isnt it weird that we have to deal with all this stuff?" I take photos of my kids on my iPhone, on my Nexus, and now Ive got 4,000 photos or so that I may never look at again. Cathy said that we're facing a question archivists have long had to deal with, which is, What of this massive corpus of stuff is worth preserving? What should we remember, and what should we forget?'

Up until now, within our entire 200 year photography experiment, we only took a photo when we wanted to preserve it.

Jess Kimball: So how are we learning to forget thus far?

Clive Thompson: Some of it might be active acts of saying, "I dont want all this stuff." Were seeing that already with SnapChat. If you talk to people who use SnapChat, theyll give you a couple reasons why they like it. One idea is that its evanescent: the photos arent being stored, so they are more conversational, more fun, and people feel more free to just do silly, stupid things.

Secondarily, people like the idea of not clogging their phone with lots of photos because the SnapChat photos arent saved. People could do like 30 SnapChats a day but after a month, they werent going to have to go through this onerous task of going, "All right. My phones full. What am I going to get rid of?" That turns out to be an emotionally difficult moment. When you think about photos, it's a really funny thing because up until now, within our entire 200 year photography experiment, we only took a photo when we wanted to preserve it.

Jess Kimball: And now part of photography's purpose has shifted.

Clive Thompson: Now that a photo can be sent in the moment to just say, "Heres what Im doing," it can become a communication act thats completely separate from the act of archiving and saving. It's taking us a long time to decouple the photo as an expressive act from the photo as a permanent archive.

Jess Kimball: So nowadays we all have these big banks of personal, digital ephemera: our photos, videos and text. I think the existence of these banks creates a set of fascinating challenges and opportunities for artists. Take the MTV show Catfish, they've created a new documentary style using peoples Facebook posts, iChat sessions, and iPhone pictures to enrich and contextualize a story...

Clive Thompson: Absolutely.

Jess Kimball: ...And that collateral completely changes the emotions that you have about the characters' love lives.

Clive Thompson: I think youre right, theyve really nailed it. There was that great little thing that went viral on YouTube, a relationship breakup purely through the Facebook interface...

It depicts all these weird documents in our lives: bits of conversations that are written down, bits of video like Skyping or Google Hangouts. Again, this is one of the reasons why I think its so interesting to pay attention to the aesthetics of these new records that we're making because they violate all the aesthetics of how we used to use recording devices.

Jess Kimball: I never thought of it like that, but it's so true.

Clive Thompson: I like to joke that it would be interesting to figure out what the most common shot in the entire history of the moving image is, if you took every second of recorded image, every movie and every home video and everything on YouTube and categorized it into types of shots. There's the tracking shot, theres the close up, but Ill bet the most common shot someone staring into a web cam or into a phone cam.

Jess Kimball: As you reference it in the book, the confessional shot from reality television.

Clive Thompson: Its almost Freudian, the confessional un-baring of the soul to a camera ensconced in your bedroom. Now the confessional shot, by Hollywood standards, is unbelievably ugly. The lightings bad, the talking into the camera is always a little off, and youre breaking fourth wall. Youre acknowledging that theres something behind the camera; it was rarely seen in movies and when it was seen, it was very jokey.

In the early days of video games, in the 80s and 90s, there was this libel that everyone was just staring at the screen,' and it was always written by people who didnt play video games.

Jess Kimball: I'm looking forward to seeing the John Hughes of the future bring our digital lives to the big screen in a new way: I mean, think about the cinematic opportunity, a hundred 17-year-olds are silently staring into their iPhones right now but their minds are being blown, they're texting with some girl or guy and they're learning that love exists! They're having the times of their lives, but in an altered form.

Clive Thompson: Those kids are going to grow up and realize that theres a way to actually write about this stuff that actually honors their experience. I think one of the reasons that Im sensitive to this, too, is that Im a video game player. In the early days of video games, in the 80s and 90s, there was this libel that everyone was just staring at the screen,' and it wa

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