102 — True to Life ⫶ Polyester ⫶ All the surfaces of things

willing to make detours for quite long periods

Hi, I’m Linda. I write a bi-weekly newsletter exploring the intersections of computer science, childhood, and culture.

1.

I’ve now visited the David Hockney 25 exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton twice. I love Hockney the visual artist, but I may love Hockney the dialogue-maker even more. His conversations are generous, clear and delightful.

Here are my favorite books of Hockney-in-conversation:

1. Spring Cannot Be Cancelled – Hockney and Martin Gayford exchanging letters during lockdown, about light, art, and life.

2. True to Life – Lawrence Weschler gathering Hockney’s life-long ideas about seeing.

3. A Bigger Message – Gayford and Hockney again, with a a deep dive into how Hockney thinks with space, photography, and perspective.

4. The Hockney Interviews – Short dialogues curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, the most recent book I purchased from the exhibition and a few excerpts sprinkled in this edition.

2.

I keep having software dreams. After a long day with Photoshop, I fall into half-sleep trying to adjust the opacity of my blanket or undo the fold in a pillow. One night, just before sleep, I was thinking about a text I’d read. In my mind, I clicked “View Source” and instead of HTML I saw the prompting history: discussions, fragments, false starts, thoughts the writer had left behind.

3.

David Hockney: (…) The last time I saw virtual reality was in Paris in September. Jonathan Yeo came over with it to show me.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: The portrait painter?

David Hockney: Yes. I put on this headset and it showed you Florence. All the buildings. And that was OK. Then he had one of Sunset Boulevard with Laurel Canyon. And I said to him, 'Well, yes', I said, 'but why are these trees like Cubist trees?' He said, 'Ah, they have difficulty with the trees. You have to photograph all the surfaces of things, and the surface of a tree is enormous because of every branch. And I've always known trees don't use the laws of perspective. I photographed some trees in East Yorkshire from the ground.

And then I photographed them looking down on them. And in both cases, you could have been looking down on them or looking up at them because they're so complicated; they don't follow the rules.

Perspective was made for architecture and comes from optics. It's an optical law, perspective. I was just reading a biography of [Giorgio] Vasari 1511-74 and it said that knowledge of optics goes back to 1050 in the Islamic world. But the Chinese and Japanese never developed glass. They had porcelain, but they never developed glass. So they never developed lenses, which meant that they never developed optics. And the Bayeux Tapestry didn't have perspective, it didn't have shadows. That's 1050. By 1420, they had perspective and shadows. That's from optics; it has to be.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: That's what you proved in your previous book.

From The Hockney Interviews by Hans Ulrich Obrist

4.

GenAI is Our Polyester. “The best way to understand generative AI art & aesthetics is to consider how previous ‘synthetics’ lost value in the long-run.” I love this framing, as I’ve been looking into William Morris and who is remembered more now for his floral wallpapers than his revolutionary ideas. He once said you can’t have art without resistance in the materials. Generative AI as a material, and especially as polyester, offers rich ground for discussion.

5.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: So you've been drawing already this morning?

David Hockney: No, not this morning because it was a bit cloudy, but we're often out drawing at six in the morning to catch the light. It's such a nice thing to do: you know, we're three-dimensional creatures and we live in a three-dimensional world, unlike cyberspace, which is not three-dimensional.

I've tended to think that the camera can't deal with landscape very well because a camera doesn't really see space - it sees surfaces. Human beings see space, and landscapes such as the Grand Canyon have always been a spatial thrill to me.

From The Hockney Interviews by Hans Ulrich Obrist

6.

Last time, I asked for recommendation about women writing at the intersection of biology, wonder, and world-building. Some are already old friends: Lulu Miller, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Rachel Carson. But I’ve been adding more names to my reading list: Evelyn Fox Keller, Lynn Margulis, Barbara McClintock.

7.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: So the question of detour is useful to you?

David Hockney: Oh yes, and I'm willing to make detours for quite long periods of time. There's a lady in California whom I've known for ages - a contemporary music person, a friend of Stockhausen; in fact, I've painted her at my Beverly Hills house - who said to me, I’ve just realised, David, that you don't mind if it takes a few years to find something out, do you?' I replied 'No I don't. In fact, I expect it to take a while. When I became interested in the optics of European painting, I thought, 'This is too interesting, I've got to find out more about it. I saw the connections with today: the camera is everywhere, so why don't we explore this, see what it's doing and what it really does? For Susan Sontag to refer to the invention of the camera... well, I would ask, can you name the inventor of the camera? Of course you can't, because there isn't one! There's an inventor of photography because that was about the invention of the chemicals, the process, but not the way of seeing, because this had been established some 500 years before.

That's what my book was saying: how people used photography wasn't important, the simple fact that they saw the world on a flat surface - and not through three dimensions - was key.

From The Hockney Interviews by Hans Ulrich Obrist