U2: Art and Technology

 

In its praise of U2’s 3D movie The New York Times review spoke of the “multiple planes of information” in the movie: a combination of shots of the audience with high definition surveillance cameras, monster-size projections of the band members, digital artworks and light sequences. Encoded into these planes seems to be fragments of the history of the moving image and allusions to the creation myths of the digital age.

 

^{Blade Runner city lights}

^{The flickering lights at the beginning of the movie made me think of the night cityscape of San Angeles, seen from above, at the beginning of Ridley Scott’s movie, Blade Runner. The movie had been on Bono’s mind when the band was putting together the Zoo TV tour. “It was our attempt to create a world rather than just songs,” he said, “and it’s a beautiful world. The opening was our manifesto, I have no compass, I have no maps, and I have no reason to go back….The opening was the audio equivalent of Blade Runner’s visuals. If you closed your eyes you could see the neon, the giant LED screens advertising all manner of ephemera.”}

^{The 3D movie begins with a girl, in athletic clothes running through the stadium and towards the stage, that reminded me of Ridley Scott’s 1984 Superbowl ad for Apple’s Macintosh computer. A grey, homogenous group of programmed people sat chanting slogans. The girl throws a discuss and shatters the screen. Apple’s 1984 wasn’t going to be the sinister and rigidly controlled world of George Orwell’s 1984 (or Microsoft’s).}

^{Discs of light spin behind U2 as they begin their first song, “Vertigo”, and shatter the distant screen bands have been trapped in on previous concert films. Stadium rock and roll might only be able to approximate intimacy but U2 filmed in concert in 3D are charmingly real and human and close.}

^{Vertigo is from the album How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. The video made for the song shows a spiral being blasted around the band members in a remote location. The spirals seared into the earth remind me of Robert Smithson’s artwork Spiral Jetty, bulldozed into the shore of a salt lake. It was made in a remote part of Utah that’s currently under threat of destruction from oil drilling. In a story in the New York Times recently, Smithson’s concerns for his artworks seem to line up with U2’s.}

 ”The State officials and some art historians, pointing to Mr. Smithson’s own writing about the ‘Spiral Jetty’ and the film he made about its construction, said he reveled in the juxtaposition of industrialism and beauty, decay and rebith, rot and permanence. The sense of ruined and abandoned hopes interested him,” said Lynne Cooke, the curator at Dia. “He didn’t look for beautiful places, but rather despoiled landscapes where industry and the wild overlap.”

Spirals turn up again and again in artworks and nature, and now the digital realm, as an expression of harmony and beauty. It’s the golden section, the golden ratio.

 

 

 

 

^{Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty.}

^{In the “Vertigo” video the spirals collapse in what looks like an inverted telescopic lens from a camera.}

                                 

^{In concert the spiral Snail image by Run Wrake,is rings of red light that spin behind the band. Saul Bass famously had turning graphic spirals in his title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, Vertigo. (Bass’s titles for Hitchcock’s North By Northwest create shifting grids across sites in New York City, and set a perspective for the movie. The shots are framed within grids and planes.)}

^{William Gibson reviewed the Vancouver and Seattle shows on the Vertigo tour for Wired. He wrote that the screens behind the band are “12,000 individual spheres of the LED backdrop: daisy-chained pixel units that have unreeled from above while the chaff storm distracted us. Hanging behind and to either side of the band, these seven curtains can be retracted and lowered as needed, throughout the performance. They have a soft, slightly slinky, nicely organic look as they descend, the individual strands suggesting the bioluminescence of deep-sea fish.” Sprockets run along the bottom of the screen directly behind the band, giving the impression of being a frame from a piece of film. The buffalos from the cover of the Greatest Hits album and the “One” video move on this simulacrum of old-fashioned film like a film-motion study by Edward Muybridge, who was an early user of multiple cameras to capture motion. He also invented a zoopraxiscope that projected motion pictures earlier than the celluloid film strip.}

Edward Muybridge Buffalo footage

U2 video for “One”

The buffalo image for the “One” video was taken from a still by artist David Wojnarowicz (who died in 1992).

Buffalo Falling by David Wojnarowicz

^{A characteristic of Julian Opie’s work is that he reduces details on humans to abstract graphics: a dash across a circle to stand in for a head and its facial features, and he represents ordinary human activities – the walking sequence that appears behind the band while they perform “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own“.}

^{Run Wrake’s movie Run Rabbit is a gory story reminiscent of the horrors of Grimm’s Folk Tales. A young girl and boy capture a rabbit and kill and skin it to make a muff, but they discover a guru in it’s belly. The story ends badly and is a cautionary tale about the consequences of greed. His inspiration was picture cards for children with words written on them, from the Dick and Jane educational series.}

 ^{In the book of interviews, U2 by U2, Bono talks about finding the image COEXIST. “A friend of mine, Emily B.,” he said, “had stumbled upon this piece of graffiti, COEXIST, with the Islamic moon as the C, the Star of David as the X and the Christian cross as the T. It turns out that it was the brainchild of a Polish artist, Piotor Mlodozeniec. It seemed such a powerful symbol of tolerance.”} 

^{Photo by Isc-Hernandez at Flickr.}

^{Bono also has it written on a revolutionary warrior-style headband.}

Photo by M3iLI55@ at Flickr

^{The human elements of the concert play against the technology. While Julian Opie’s nondescript man trundles along Bono has taken off his glasses to sing the song he wrote for his father and sang at his funeral. But he doesn’t make eye contact with the camera, remaining downcast and privately grieving as he sings of being unable to make a connection with his father while he was alive. The radioactive green ectoplasm of the warmth emitted by living objects through night vision glasses begins a battle song, and fighter planes are seen flying low across the screen. But Bono sings beside Larry Mullen playing a stand up drum like the drummer boy from a military band. The combination of traditional human elements and technology is powerfully affecting. But it’s just as effective in low tech. The National Theatre of Scotland showed night-battle footage on a small low-resolution television screen and marched to regimental martial music played by a bagpiper. A few centuries of war imagery were compressed into a few symbols and tore at your heart.}

^{The movie was released by National Geographic using technology that’s mostly been used for nature movies. A trailer for a 3D version of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth preceded U23D. In Paris in the Twentieth Century, written at the turn of the twentieth century,}

^{Verne predicted many of the technologies we’re now living with, and many of their negative social effects. But his epic novels, and those of H. G. Wells, were known as “scientific romances”. While Wells was sending humankind into space and backwards and forwards through time, Verne was making symbolic journeys into the centre of the earth and below the ocean. Dr. Robert Ballard is an explorer-in-residence with National Geographic and is most famous for finding the ship-wreck of The Titanic. His branch of technology is telepresence, sending his robots deep into the ocean where humans can’t physically go, and monitoring them, now over the internet, at a distance. He’s brought up close to the action through the images the robots send to him. The images he’s sent from the submersible robots can be accessed in 3D. “Well, basically, when you’re working closely with a wreck, it’s very easy to get entangled,” he said. “It’s very easy to get in trouble. So the Voyager the Perry Tritech submersible, had stereo eyes provided by NASA Ames. And with this vehicle system you could put on your stereo glasses and all of a sudden you could see in three dimensions, which made it possible to navigate through the wreckage. And it was just like the difference between having one or two eyes. You see depth perception, which is very important in dangerous settings. It made it infinitely easy to manoeuvere.”}

Video footage from Robert Ballard's return to the Titanic in 2004, twenty years after he discovered the wreck.

^{Every journey outwards is also a journey inwards, as Verne suggested, and Dr Ballard was inspired by Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea as he was growing up. He’s also been inspired by Joseph Campbell’s notion of the hero’s journey, being curious and open-hearted enough to go into unexplored spiritual territory. He quotes Campbell saying life is an act of becoming, we never arrive.}

^{Ken Goldberg is an artist and scientist who also works in the field of telepresence. He created the first telerobotic art project on the internet, which was a series of artefacts from Journey to the Centre of the Earth buried in a sandbox. People could operate a blower over the internet to blow sand away from the objects, and then try to identify them in a forum. His next project was the Telegarden, a robot arm that could be controlled over the internet to plant seeds, water, and weed a garden plot. Many of his other projects also have a direct connection to land art. Mori is a monitoring of the seismic activity of the Hayward Fault that runs under San Francisco turned into sound and organised into a form of music. For the hundredth anniversary of the 1904 earthquake in San Francisco a principal dancer from the San Francisco Ballet improvised a dance in real-time to the sound from the fault.}

^{Mori Installation. Ken Goldberg, Artwork.}

^{Other, more recent projects, look at the implications of surveillance technology. One mimicking John Baldessari’s bubbles of colour obscuring the faces of people in photographs with live surveillance footage. And a robotic camera intended to be set in remote areas for researchers to monitor wildlife collaboratively from their separate universities, was set up on the back deck of Craigslist founder Craig Newmark’s house at the edge of the Sutro Forest in San Francisco and a community of users identified birds caught on the video footage.}

^{In concert U2 uses surveillance camera footage, described by William Gibson in his Wired review.}

^{Willie Williams is this show’s Man Behind the Curtain. Everyone tells me I have to see him, especially his collection of screengrabs from the remote-control surveillance cameras he’s built into the Vertigo node to provide images for the giant scrim screens. … From Yorkshire by way of London punk, he met U2 in 1982, and the rest is entertainment history. His innovations have become industry standard. His cameras, he tells me, are capable of picking out eyelashes – in the dark.}

^{“It’s only about a week ago that I’ve started doing this,” says Williams modestly as we watch a slide show of gorgeously lo-res surveillance stills on his PowerBook. “I’m trying not to be self-conscious about it. To begin with I was just playing, really. And they’re quite difficult to control with a little PlayStation set, but that’s all part of the joy of it. I’m trying not to overthink it.” He had a PlayStation handset modified to allow him to control a number of small, infrared, black-and-white cameras, originally intending to use them to obtain covert imagery of the crowd, which he then mixes for display on the various screens above the stage. Mind you don’t pick your nose at a U2 concert. Williams quickly discovered that his cameras offered him extraordinary views of the band in performance, and he’s been happily collecting these at every show. “It’s a great way of involving the audience. The physical nature of the set uses the fact that the audience wants to be part of the show.”}

^{Reminding him of his punk past, I ask where he sees this sort of technology going. “What I’m enjoying,” Williams tells me, “is that the technology is becoming affordable enough that younger bands are interested in doing something with it. At the end of the ’90s, the live-music industry was dividing. There was the large-show, big-ticket nostalgia bands, the Eagles or whatever, but it wasn’t anything to do with a rock show. That was where the production values were. The younger bands had no interest. Starting with Radiohead, though, I’m now seeing younger bands who are interested in the technology and where it can go. It’s part of their language, really.” He smiles. “When you’ve got cell phones that can make movies, it’s suddenly not so gauche to put some energy into your visual presentation.” Williams leans back in his chair and grins. “We’re thinking of webcasting concerts through U2.com, but part of the deal would be that subscribers could only watch us if we can watch them, through their home webcams, and then we’d all get to watch those images ”}