- [Announcer] Live from your Public Media studios, WVIA presents "Keystone Edition Arts."

A public affairs program that goes beyond the headlines to address issues in Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania.

This is "Keystone Edition Arts."

And now, Erika Funke.

(gentle music) - Welcome to "Keystone Edition Arts."

AI?

Oh, my!

We'll explore creativity and technology in this time of change.

Sarah Scinto has this snapshot from our region.

(logo whooshing) - [Sarah] History is full of lessons about how technology changes the world of arts and culture by influencing how artists create and how we view their work.

Wilkes-Barre native Lyman Howe was an early adopter of technology.

In the late 1800s, he was interested in moving pictures and succeeded in creating a projector to show them.

Then, he made movies, even filming our region while in an airplane, creating images that drones provide today.

Art students at East Stroudsburg University have access to a 3D printing lab which allows them to create in three dimensions, a form of computer-assisted sculpture that expands the possibilities of what is considered art.

Darlene Farris-LaBar, the 3D printing lab director, uses 3D printing to create art highlighting the importance of plants and the environment.

(gentle music) In addition to painting murals on the Dietrich Theater in Tunkhannock, artist and digital enthusiast, Bob Lizza, uses a highly specialized scanner that results in very exact reproductions of fine art.

This technology can be helpful when restoring historically significant pieces or commemorating meaningful events.

It's been used for clients as varied as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Vatican.

From movie cameras and airplanes to drones, and from hand painting to computer-assisted design, today's creators and consumers of art have greater options and access to explore the world.

For "Keystone Edition Arts," I'm Sarah Scinto, WVIA News.

- If we think at all about pencils these days, we probably don't think of them as tools.

But those who care about pencils actually consider them to be a form of communications technology.

And like Sean Meehan, they love taking us back to early America where everyone who needed one used pencils made in Europe.

That is until the Thoreau family and its pencil factory began making its mark in that market.

In fact, Henry David Thoreau, a "Walden" fame, was an innovator in Pennsylvania pencil technology and manufacture.

Writing was primary for him though.

Thoreau wanted to write sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, sentences which are expansive towards which so much life went, which lie like boulders on the page up and down or across, which contain the seed of other sentences.

Not mere repetition, but creation.

He worried that photography of the time didn't do enough of that.

Thoreau also considered notions of fading and disappearing, the way aspects of nature do and human-made images too.

And so we'll hear echoes now of these concerns in our 21st century context as we talk with two compelling guests who have thought widely and deeply about technology and the arts.

Richard Rinehart, director of the Samek Art Museum at Bucknell University at Lewisburg.

He has served as digital media director and adjunct curator at UC Berkeley Arts Museum, and as curator at New Langton Arts, as well as for the San Jose Arts Commission.

He's taught courses on art and new media at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and the San Francisco Art Institute and elsewhere.

He led the NEA-funded project Archiving the Avant Garde to preserve digital art.

And he has co-authored a book for MIT Press on collecting and preserving media culture.

It's a wonderful title, "Re-collection," or "Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory."

So good to have you with us in the studio, Richard.

- Thanks for having me.

- And, in the meantime, Richard has been here, but we go to Zoom with our guest, John Paul.

Regional audiences were wowed by the 2023 exhibition titled "Landscapes Within Landscapes & Process," featuring work of John Paul Caponigro at the Sordoni Art Gallery at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre.

John Paul is a pioneer among visual artists working with digital media.

He consults with the corporations that build the tools he uses including Adobe, Apple, Canon, Kodak, Sony.

A member of the Photoshop Hall of Fame, Epson's Stylus Pros, and X-Rite's Coloratti, his work is published widely in periodicals and books, including Art News and The Ansel Adams Guide.

He's a highly sought after speaker and he leads unique adventures in the wildest places on earth to help participants creatively make deeper connections with nature and themselves.

It's interesting to note that your first iPhone is in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution because of your pioneering work, right, John Paul?

Yeah.

Well, we'd love to- (indistinct) if you would each talk about your own relationship to technology, and then maybe you can trade insights and stories with each other about this moment in time and thoughts about the future.

We began with a pencil, John Paul, because at your Sordoni show, you talked about your process and how you still draw with a pencil.

That's true, right?

- Yeah, life's not worth living without a pencil.

Or some drawing and writing instrument.

So I started drawing before I could talk.

Almost got her family kicked out of her apartment in Dublin for taking up mural making.

So my parents put blocks of paper in every room and they paper trained me, and I've not stopped since.

So... - But you are keen on trying the newest technologies and so forth, but how does the pencil serve you in the work that you're doing that is so cutting edge?

- It's flexible like writing on my iPhone.

You put something down with pen or paint, and it sticks around a little longer.

So it's very fluid and versatile, and it's very easy to carry.

It can always be there with you.

For some reason, there's something about the tactile quality of a physical pencil rather than drawing on my iPhone.

I've tried it.

I've tried drawing on my iPad, and it's reasonable, but I still need an apple pencil to execute something that's got a little more substance to it.

It's a way of thinking, it's a way of seeing, it's a way of understanding the external world and the internal world and how the two meet.

I'm different when I use a pencil.

- Huh.

And you also are a poet.

You will use words too in terms of crafting where you're going with your images sometimes.

Is that right?

- Absolutely.

Absolutely.

and even more recently with experiments with AI using text to generate images.

I've yet to find a good AI that will generate text from images, but this whole notion of telling a story or keywording something and then having an image rendered, which is somewhat surprising.

I mean, there's always the element of surprise in art, but now more so than ever.

So I find it every time I pick up a different tool, whether it be a pencil or a camera or an AI software, something different happens in me, and the results reflect that.

- And were you nodding a little bit when we were talking about Thoreau and his sense of wanting the reverberations, the open space with his sentences, rather than trying to capture exactly what he was seeing when he was out around Walden Pond?

Yes?

- Very much.

It's the old idea of leaving space for the viewer.

You can't put everything into any work and you want the thing to be interactive.

So writers talk about what's in between the lines, reading in between the lines literally or what's in the margins.

Musicians talk about how music is also in the silences in between the notes.

And as a photographer, I often try and indicate what's outside the frame.

And in particular with photography, what might have happened before or what might happen after.

- Yes, yes.

So we'll talk a little bit more about AI, but we want to move on to Richard and say that it's wonderful that you were working in Silicon Valley's backyard for quite some time.

You were at Berkeley, you were in the hood there where those developments were happening.

How and why did you get drawn to the study of what's happening in digital media, for example, new media?

- Well, I think you hit upon it just now.

I was in the right place at the right time.

I always have loved art, so I knew that was my career trajectory.

And then I just landed, you know, in the mid 1990s in the Bay Area, which, as you mentioned, was a hotbed.

It was the birth of Google and Apple was being reinvented and a lot of things were happening there.

And I just happened to be working at an art museum at a university.

And I had a lot of friends at the university and sort of in the art world and socially in the area who were starting to pick up jobs in the new media field, and a lot of them were artists.

And so they started to pick up these new tools and started to use them, you know, computer-based media in particular.

They started to use them to produce art.

And for me, it was just, it's a natural.

Art and technology have always gone together.

I mean, I think the root word of technology is a Greek word technes, which also means, in Greek, art.

So those two concepts are not foreign to each other at all.

And I guess what I would say is that, you know, art is usually physical so it takes some sort of technology to make it, whether it's a throwing wheel or a paint brush or a pencil or something like that.

And then, you know, artists who are just using newer media, like computer based media, are asking the same kind of questions that artists who used paintbrushes did.

They're asking questions about what makes us human.

And I think the way that they're using these technologies is they're asking those questions sometimes by testing the limits of what is human.

If I do this with this tool, is that still art?

Is it still human?

Am I still a human if I'm using a robot to make art?

So it's a good way of getting at those essential art questions of what it is to be human by sort of testing the limits of, you know, where does my humanity end and the tool begins?

Although I have to say, at the end of the day, one answer to all of those questions could be that we are the technology using animal.

That's what defines us as human beings.

So you could just say anything that is done with human-made technology is human by definition.

- Well, you, for example, at the Samek Art Museum, are serving not just the community at large.

And we hope people, if they haven't been, to visit the museum, will, but also the student body of Bucknell University.

And our Chris Hendrickson went to a workshop that Samek was hosting with the conservator who was well known, Dianne Modestini, for the Leonardo painting of the- - Salvator Mundi.

- Salvator Mundi.

And you had her as a guest and she was showing how she would proceed in restoring a Renaissance painting, for example, because you have quite a collection of those period pieces.

But you have an interest, not in just that, but you want to say, "Well, John Paul creates these remarkable images.

How do we make sure they're around for the future?"

So what kinds of things did you have to come to terms with in, 'cause you've written a book?

- Yeah.

Well, that's a very good question.

So when, again, it goes back to when I was in California.

And in the mid-'90s, these artists started to use these new media tools to make art.

And since I was working in a museum context, it dawned on me, "Well, we're gonna start to show this art and then somebody's gonna buy this art, it's gonna end up in a museum collection.

And then how are we gonna preserve it for the next 100, 200 years?"

You know, something that somebody made on a Mac laptop in 1998, how are we gonna preserve that?

Because, of course, the laptop's gonna become obsolete and stop working.

The software that it's written on is gonna become obsolete and stop working.

And the kind of work that Dianne Modestini does, you know, which is traditional art conservation, and of course she's at the top of that game, is possible.

Well, it's a marriage of very old technologies, you know, sort of medieval level technologies.

There's scrapers and there's paints and there's brushes and solvents and 21st century technologies too, right?

Chemical engineering and all that kind of comes to bear.

But museums have been able to do that for, you know, the last century or two because we can have that kind of medieval workshop in our basement.

You know, we can sort of have the solvents and the wood shop and that sort of thing, but we're not gonna be able to repair that Apple laptop.

You know, we just don't have that kind of wherewithal.

And the industry itself isn't interested in really preserving that either.

The tech industry really isn't interested in preserving the old stuff 'cause they're onto the next thing, you know?

So, I thought, "Oh, this is, you know, a big conundrum."

Like, the usual museum methods are not going to work for preserving this kind of art.

So with my collaborator, John Apolito, we set forth to write a book sort of for the field as a kind of field guide.

You know, how might you go about preserving this kind of work for the next couple hundred years?

And I think what we arrived at is that you have to, you have to leave the hardware behind.

You know, museums are very object focused, which makes a lot of sense, of course.

That's our passion.

But, you know, the early museums were saying, "Well, I'm just gonna collect that laptop.

That'll go in the collection, and therefore, I've collected the art."

But that's gonna stop working in 20 years.

And then in 40 years, you know, it's just gonna...

It's not a viable strategy.

So we had to say, you know, you're gonna have to abstract the artwork out of that hardware and treat it as something else.

And for museums, this is like brain death.

This is like, "No, you can't separate the art from the object.

They are one and the same."

But the breakthrough that I had, at least mentally, is that we do have a tradition for preserving these kind of more ephemeral artworks, not in the museum world of visual art, but in the world of music.

So if you think about it, music is, you know, it's been around probably longer than the physical arts and yet we've found ways to preserve music.

But I think the way that we do that is that we're a bit more flexible with it.

You know, when we re-perform, that is to say bring back to life a piece of music, we allow ourselves to reinterpret it and to sort of allow the edges of it to blur a little bit.

So you still know, you know, when you're performing Vivaldi's, you know, "Spring" series, that that's what it is.

You can recognize it 'cause the core is the same, but it's always sort of reinterpreted.

And so I thought, "That's kind of how we have to approach digital art."

We have to approach it like music and try and preserve it using that kind of mindset that we're gonna bring it back to life on new hardware again and again, and we're gonna have to allow ourselves to be a bit flexible with how that turns out.

- John Paul, what do you think about your own work and how do you react to what Richard has laid out for us?

- I think about it a lot, and I think Richard is spot on.

And I'm listening to it and I just need to note the irony that four weeks ago, I went down to Northern Argentina and Bolivia.

And two days before leaving, my hard drive wouldn't boot.

So, while I was gone, we found the right computer tech to help us.

It really wasn't a problem with the hard drive, it was a problem with a system and an update on the driver for the hard drives.

And because I'm dealing with 32 terabytes of data in a rural environment, I didn't use my COVID time to back everything up on Backblaze.

So I'm two thirds of the process through getting all of my life's work into the cloud.

But it's an interesting feeling to think, "Well, what if those drives didn't come back, and what if it is the system and I can't just grab the backup over at my dad's place, where'd my life's work go?"

And so I agree that it needs to be separated from the hard drive and we need to be able to migrate the data to whatever media people are using and using an archival format.

I hope that's a TIFF file for our images.

But Richard also brings up a really interesting idea.

If Ansel Adams said the negative is the score and the print is the performance, don't we also want to preserve his performance?

Ansel also gave his negatives to the University of Tucson and allows people, that institution, and Ansel intended for students to be able to come in and access those negatives and even print them.

- [Erika] Wow.

- So how do we preserve an artist's performance and do we allow for future performances of images at least?

And wouldn't it be wonderful if we could actually hear the way Vivaldi performed those pieces?

- Hmm.

- It would be.

One of the things that I hit upon is, 'cause you mentioned Vivaldi, what if we had a recording of Vivaldi?

I mean, that would be very useful for performing the work again.

But a recording is a very specific kind of documentation of an artwork.

It's a recording of a past state of an artwork, right?

Whereas again, to use music as the analogy analogy here, there is another kind of documentation in the musical score.

And the score is a different kind of documentation in that it documents the future state of an artwork.

And this is kind of where I was thinking we needed to go with digital artists to record its future state.

Having a recording of its past state is good as a reference, but what we really need is guidance for how to recreate that in the future on new hardware, as is done, again, in music all the time, right?

You play pieces that were originally composed for a harpsichord or a piano, on the new piano, on a pianoforte, the modern, you know, piano.

And that happens all the time, that kind of interpretation.

And then there are debates about authentic versus inauthentic interpretations, and that all seems very healthy.

It seems like that's where we inevitably have to go and where I see museums going with preserving the kind of work that you produce, John Paul.

I'm sort of curious, if I might ask, what strategies do you use to preserve your work for the long term and what's the oldest work that you've created in the digital realm that you still have?

- 1990 is the oldest.

- Okay.

- Backups on hard drives and now up in the cloud.

Also, for some of them, prints.

- So you print them out and preserve the print?

- Yes, but that's only a fraction of my archive.

Not all of my images that I've created, I'd say, even maybe a third of the images I've created, and I'm being generous, have actually been printed 'cause I'm fairly prolific.

So some of them may never get printed and they may just exist in a digital state.

And of course if you're looking at a video or a GIF or some other thing that includes motion, one has to look at it on a screen rather than in a physical print, that might last longer depending on how we handle our media.

But I'm curious, Richard, also, how does one think of the "Mona Lisa" and her future state?

- [Richard] In what sense?

- Well, I mean, it's interesting to be looking at a musical score and thinking about the future state, the next performance, the way that it's delivered.

But with sculpture, with imagery that's been fixed on a canvas, that performance we still wanna preserve, right?

- Yeah, absolutely.

And I think that's what the earlier clip of Dianne Modestini was showing, is that, in a way, that's what museums are really good at, is preserving the original object with as little intervention and the least aggressive kind of intervention possible.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Yeah.

John Paul, your father has been a great influence in your life and a remarkable photographer.

With the technology that he had available when you were young and growing up, what did you learn from him?

'cause you're going to have an exhibition soon of your work and his work.

How was he... Was he an early adapter like you are or was he someone who, again, it's a tool and I'll it to do what I need to do?

- It's a tool, sure.

I mean, he was certainly not one of the first photographers, right?

- Right, but- - He's well after...

Right.

And in terms of his archive, we're looking at negatives and prints.

And, you know, they're in a fireproof vault, but there's only one of them.

In a few cases, we've been making a few new negs for dads.

Some of the necks have deteriorated.

Sometimes there's some dodging and burning.

That's tough to do.

And we've been making him new negatives back on regular film that will go into his enlarger, but that means we also have the digital file now.

So now as somebody who will inherit his archive, I now be need thinking about how do we not only preserve the physical objects, but how many of those do we scan and how many do we preserve in the digital form, as I'm sure Richard has been going through that kind of thing with the museums for a very long time.

- Yeah.

Yeah, I like to say that digital media will last five years or forever, whichever comes first.

(John and Erika laughs) So I'm curious with your work, John Paul, if I might ask.

So you've been producing things since the '90s, at least in the digital realm, both moving images, video, and still images.

Have you had to migrate any of those file formats to new file formats?

And if so, I'm curious, what kind of artistic decisions did you have to make about how much they were allowed to vary, right?

You move to a new format and you notice the colors not the same or the edges aren't the same.

What was your thought process as an artist about what's allowable in that transformation?

- You know, since 1990, it really hasn't been the file format.

TIFF has been doing the trick for us and will for the foreseeable future.

I do convert my (indistinct) into DNGs.

So, theoretically, that's a universal for format.

It's really been the media that it's stored on.

Where originally, I was using (indistinct) drives, then went to optical drives, then went to CDs, then went to another media, and then gave up and just kept it on hard drives to now I'm moving into the cloud.

So, there's been a constant migration from one physical object to another on what's actually storing the data.

But the data has relatively stayed the same.

Now, when I say that, some of those files were made before color management existed, so you have a bunch of numbers in a file and you've got no standard recipe for what they look like.

Until now.

I mean, as part of that whole transition of watching the industry adopt an ICC standard, thank god, and helping get the word out about that and having some conversation.

So now that we have... At least there's a way to interpret that, 'cause essentially, that's just a decoder ring.

You've got a bunch of numbers that's supposed to render color, but in what color space, what recipe for color?

Otherwise, the things will look very different.

- Yeah, and monitor technology has changed.

So when you show those images, of course, they may look different even though you know it's the same.

What about video technology?

I know video codecs have changed a lot over the years.

A lot of early QuickTime videos just won't even play on any contemporary media player.

- Yeah, yeah.

And I've done less video, and so I haven't had those issues a lot more, right?

- Richard, you have plans to curate a show dedicated to the themes that we've been talking about at the Samek Art Museum at Bucknell people should take note and look for.

But what kinds of things are you going to bring before us?

- Well, thanks for asking.

So in the spring of 2025 at the Samek Art Museum at Bucknell University, we'll be presenting a show on AI, art, and culture.

So AI's impact on culture.

So it's really kind of just the latest technology.

I've been curating a lot of shows earlier about, you know, other aspects of technology and art.

But with the AI one, it's... Well, I think what I'm gonna focus on with that show, 'cause it's too broad to just say, everything AI and art.

You know, that's a huge topic.

So I'm gonna try and focus on one aspect that I see coming from the intersection of AI and art and culture in particular, and that is a sort of social isolation.

Let me just back up for a minute and tell you my premise for the show.

So, we already have experienced with social media the echo chamber and the development of, you know, the news.

We don't all get our news from the same place anymore, and this has contributed to political polarization and kind of social isolation at the tribes.

But up until now, we've shared more in the cultural realm, right?

We could all sort of gather around and listen to, you know, the latest Taylor Swift song or we could talk at work about the latest "Avengers" movie or something like that.

Like, there was still some shared cultural, as much as there was different, there's some shared moments like that.

And what I see in the future with AI being able to generate media in real time, not just ahead of time, is that, you know, there could be no need for Disney or Netflix to produce shows and record them and disseminate them.

I could easily imagine a scenario in which you come home from work and you say to your AI media generator, I'd like to see a movie about this topic and maybe starring these kind of people that look like these people, and I want this kind of an ending, and AI just generates it on the fly.

- Well, we can't thank you each enough, Richard and John Paul, for being with us.

And we've talked about Vivaldi and we've talked about music.

And if you watch "Keystone Edition Arts," you may know that we don't have any theme music.

So we thought we'd challenge AI to create a theme song for us.

So let's take it out with AI.

(gentle bright music)