Category Archives: museums

A burgeoning technology you wouldn’t be seen dead with

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For the Telegraph on 26 January 2025, and Inspired by Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy at Somerset House, London

Long-distance relationships are hard to do, but my goodness they’re fun: all that flitting about between mutually inconvenient cities, Muscat to Odessa, Dubai to Istanbul…
A good 90 per cent of the time, though, we were together alone — witness the huge message chain preserved on my smartphone.

The thing about the WhatsApp messaging service is that it’s happy by design, beautifully geared to meme-sharing and goofing-off. Even if you’re not in the mood, you’re only ever a couple of clicks away from sharing an exploding unicorn head or a river of balloons or a video of someone’s pet cat nailing middle-C.

As I cast a bleak eye over our last messages, I see that my girlfriend and I weren’t really spending time together at all; we were just toying with the app.

New technological applications are even now shaping the future of sex, intimacy, friendship and desire. This, anyway, is the hypothesis underpinning a series of talks and screenings starting soon at Somerset House Studios in London. “Hyper Functional, Ultra Healthy” is the programme’s umbrella title, the strong implication being that technology will, at best, save us from our less-healthy impulses; while at worst it will persuade us to sacrifice our humanity on the altar of productivity.

I think the future could be altogether more wild and enjoyable. I think intimacy technologies of various sorts are going to be good for us sometimes, and a lot of fun in any case — just so long as we get over our angst-ridden, future-shocked selves and embrace — literally and figuratively — what we have made.

In Spike Jonze’s 2013 romantic comedy Her, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), an artificially intelligent operating system. Because Samantha is at least as conscious as Theodore, the film is a rather charming red herring. The film we needed, in the year sales of smartphones surpassed feature-phone sales for the first time, was one in which Theodore falls in love with an entry-level smartphone assistant like Alexa, or Siri — a being that is patently not conscious, though it puts on a good show.

That really would have got under our skin.

We want our lovers to really love us. But what if they could keep us just as happy by behaving as if they loved us? Then we wouldn’t even have to build better and better technology to satisfy our needs and desires; we could just lower our expectations of what it is to be human.
If we’re so easily debased, there’s not a lot left to say: only that we deserved our fate. But why should things turn out so badly? I reckon we could learn to live quite happily in a world full of non-human agents while being, like Red Riding Hood, on constant guard against those who try to pass themselves off as “one of us”.

Between here and there lie three obstacles.

First, we’ll have to accept that we can and should seek solace from non-human agents. If books and plays have a thing or two to tell us about the world and how to live in it, then why not GPT-5 or Gemini?

In 2019 an international survey of psychiatrists (which sounds like the start of a joke, but never mind) half believed AI would significantly change their profession.

That half was right. The NHS is evaluating the use of conversational agents in talking to users about their mental health. Systems like Leora, spun out of the Australian disability care sector to provide support for mild symptoms of anxiety and depression, have gone a long way to prove the concept. Other systems are still more advanced: why tie up a human therapist when Stanford University’s Woebot shows all the signs of delivering cognitive-behavioural therapy with equal efficacy over your smartphone?

Next, we’ll have to get comfortable around robots and digital assistants who behave as if they love us. This should not be too difficult: cats have been faking affection for us for about six million years, so we’ve had plenty of exposure.

Ah, but how will our machines love us? This is where, like it or not, the conversation turns to (yawn now) sex robots.

In the current climate, we’re allowed two responses to sex robots.

Following the lead of TV series like Westworld and films like Ex Machina (and don’t tell me that wasn’t a sex robot), we fear what they might do to us. Also, we fear what sort of people we might become when we’re with a sex robot. This is very much an argument about means and ends. If I mistreat a robot today, will I find it easier to mistreat a fellow human tomorrow? This is an excellent point; also an old one and not really limited to robots. (People who mistreat animals score highly on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist.)

What we’re absolutely not supposed to do is use a sex robot, although many people do. The global market for this gear was valued at approximately $30 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach over $100 billion by 2032. Machines designed specifically for women are worth $23 billion and while this market’s expanding more slowly, by 2032 it’s still expected to top $54 billion. That’s a lot of cash being thrown at consumer durables people wouldn’t be seen dead with.

And this, neatly enough, brings us to the third and most difficult hurdle: we’re going to finally have to decouple sex and intimacy.

*

It’s not as though these two were ever comfortable bedfellows, whatever the sentimentalists might claim. In the 11,000 years that separate the birth of sedentary agriculture and the bumper harvests brought in by the agricultural revolution in the 18th century, the regular production of children was an activity essential for people’s economic survival. Farms needed hands to work them. A woman’s value lay in her sexuality. It was an economic good and came with a price — a very high one, most of the time.

For all that time we craved adult intimacy, but we needed children. Reconciling ourselves to this miserable state of affairs was a job of work, but we managed it, not once, but many times, by inventing marriage. This charitable fiction convinced us that the world was backwards – that while we needed adult intimacy, what we really craved was children.

In the West the Enlightenment eventually put paid to the lie, ushering in a doctrine of reasoned sexual self-interest under whose influence, wrote Claire Clairmont, stepsister of Mary Shelley, “Lord B[yron] became a human tyger slaking his thirst for inflicting pain upon defenceless women who under the influence of free love… loved him.”

From Byron to Weinstein, the permissive society has undermined religious strictures around sex and replaced them with a free-for-all that has often left women in a worse state. Of her would-be male seducers, the 18th-century writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had this to say: “‘Tis play to you, ’tis but death to us.”

Better birth control offered a partial fix, but what we really need to do is decouple sex and intimacy, then we might be able to jettison coercion and childbearing in one go. What’s not to like about that?

I know, I know, this is a terrible thing to say. But look at the numbers. Wherever and whenever living standards rise, the birth rate falls. A 2020 study in the Lancet projected that 23 countries, including Spain and Japan, could see their populations halve by 2100 due to low fertility rates. The total fertility rate in England and Wales has fallen to 1.44 children per woman, its lowest level on record. The United Nations projects that over half of the world’s population growth by 2100 will be concentrated in just eight countries.

There are all kinds of reasons: more processed food, better education for women, a more atomised working environment. Actual infertility aside (a growing and mysterious problem we can’t get into here) all these are aspects on the same unmentionable truth: the more time we make for ourselves, the less time we invest in child-rearing.

It’s not that we don’t want sex. We just don’t want it with each other. Now that market forces are finally prising sex out of the bedroom and into the public gaze, it turns out that there are many more enjoyable ways to have sex. Not all involve technology directly. Most sex clubs are run on a shoestring by enthusiasts; they’re certainly not splashing out on robots. Still, they use social media to bring cohorts together in numbers sufficient to get by, And if the club’s too far away, you could always show off on OnlyFans: heck, that site pays you. Now that sex toys are part of the internet of things – networked, remotely controlled, and even self-controlled to some degree — sex ceases to be a purely private affair and becomes a civic act.

All right, all right, let me offer an olive branch here. Love is real; pair-bonding is real; in many of us, the desire for children is real; and, yes, humans fall in love all the time.

But If we maintain the food supply and continue to chisel away at poverty then, as a wole, fewer women will have fewer children and they will have them later in life. And this leaves us casting around, trying to work out what sex is for, now that procreation has been knocked off its 11,000-year-old pedestal.

Technology holds out two incompatible answers to this question. One set of technologies comforts us, but doesn’t really work. The other set works a treat, but it will have even the most hardened roué weeping for humanity.

Digital comfort-blankets even now provide solace to an increasingly atomised society. For platonic cuddling services, visit Cuddle Sanctuary or Cuddlist (now offering on-line cuddles). If you want to text back and forth with an AI companion, sign up with Replika or its more blokey kin, Soulfun AI and DreamGF. VR Chat and Somnium Space are your gateways to the metaverse where you’ll most likely run into people just like you (good luck with that).

Many of these apps and websites are in dire need of updating. My guess is, they’re not doing wildly well, And no wonder: they’re not playing to the strengths of their own medium. They’re trying to sell human intimacy through a piece of tempered glass, which is daft.

These services want you to buy a packet of commoditised human experience, rather than take action for yourself. In the same way, people in the early 1900s used to sell pianola rolls door to door to families who could no longer be bothered to play their own pianos.

Well, the piano is one thing; your life is surely something else. It’s not that hard to make friends. Go to church! Volunteer at a food bank!

The other set of technologies does work and boy, does it earn its market share. Porn is a much more effective form of digital address because it plays to digital strengths: glamour, glossiness, hardness, mechanical repetition. And it’s an aesthetic you can translate wholesale into the real world very easily. Profitably, too: is that branch of Coco de Mer an unfailingly friendly place to shop for well-made leather goods, or an actor in the hidden war to pornocratise the culture? Can’t it be both?

The prigs and prudes among us fight their frantic rearguard actions. In the motley of sexual radicalism they preach the virtues of ethical and consensual non-monogamy, polyamory and compersion. But thumb through Feeld (a non-traditional dating app) and #Open (a marginally raunchier competitor) at your peril: anyone who’s earned their scars will tell you of the coercion and abuse these lifestyles spawn.

Don’t live in the past. Say hello to the circus and the sideshow and FinalCut Pro, to the smartphone and the ring-light and the tripod, to doll-makers, to latex-cutters, to sculptors in silicone and thermoplastic elastomer. Even now, designers besotted with perfect curves are laying before you their smooth, glossy path to a burlesque world where sex is a hybrid thing, half-real, half-digital. Goodbye, marriage and its rubbishy “alternatives”, Goodbye love, and every enlightened impulse.

Or do what you need to do, you hopeless sentimentalists: no-one’s out to stop you being happy together. Intimacy will tick by and that’s all one can really say about it.

Sex, though – now there’s a gift that will only keep on giving.

I’d sooner gamble

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Speculation around the 2024 US election prompted this article for the Telegraph, about the dark arts of prediction

On July 21, the day Joe Biden stood down, I bet £50 that Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, would end up winning the 2024 US presidential election. My wife remembers Whitmer from their student days, and reckons she’s a star in the making. My £50 would have earned me £2500 had she actually stood for president and won. But history makes fools of us all, and my bet bought me barely a day of that warm, Walter-Mittyish feeling that comes when you stake a claim in other people’s business.

The polls this election cycle indicated a tight race – underestimating Trump’s reach. But cast your mind back to 2016, when the professional pollster Nate Silver said Donald Trump stood a 29 per cent chance of winning the US presidency. The betting market, on the eve of that election, put Trump on an even lower 18 per cent chance. Gamblers eyed up the difference, took a punt, and did very well. And everyone else called Silver an idiot for not spotting Trump’s eventual win.

Their mistake was to think that Silver was a fortune-teller.

Divination is a 6,000-year-old practice that promises to sate our human hunger for certainty. On the other hand, gambling on future events – as the commercial operation we know today – began only a few hundred years ago in the casinos of Italy. Gambling promises nothing, and it only really works if you understand the mathematics.

The assumption that the world is inherently unpredictable – so that every action has an upside and a downside – got its first formal expression in Jacob Bernoulli’s 1713 treatise Ars Conjectandi (“The Art of Conjecturing”), and many of us still can’t wrap our heads around it. We’d sooner embrace certainties, however specious, than take risks, however measurable.
We’re risk-averse by nature, because the answer to the question “Well, what’s the worst that could happen?” has, over the course of evolution, been very bad indeed. You could fall. You could be bitten. You could have your arm ripped off. (Surprise a cat with a cucumber and it’ll jump out of its skin, because it’s still afraid of the snakes that stalked its ancestors.)

Thousands of years ago, you might have thrown dice to see who buys the next round, but you’d head to the Oracle to learn about events that could really change your life. A forthcoming exhibition at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Oracles, Omens and Answers, takes a historical look at our attempts to divine the future. You might assume those Chinese oracle bones are curios from a distant and more innocent time – except that, turning a corner, you come across a book by Joan Quigley, who was in-house astrologer to US president Ronald Reagan. Our relationship to the future hasn’t changed very much, after all. (Nancy Reagan reached out to Quigley after a would-be assassin’s bullet tore through her husband’s lung. What crutch would I reach for, I wonder, at a moment like that?)

The problem with divination is that it doesn’t work. It’s patently falsifiable. But this wasn’t always the case. In a world radically simpler than our own, there are fewer things that can happen, and more likelihood of one of them happening in accordance with a prediction. This turned omens into powerful political weapons. No wonder, then, that in 11 AD, Augustus banned predictions pertaining to the date of someone’s death, while at the same time the Roman emperor made his own horoscope public. At a stroke, he turned astrology from an existential threat into a branch of his own PR machine.

The Bamoun state of western Cameroon had an even surer method for governing divination – in effect until the early 20th century. If you asked a diviner whether someone important would live or die, and the diviner said they’d live, but actually they died, then they’d put you, rather than the diviner, to death.

It used to be that you could throw a sheep’s shoulder blade on the flames and tell the future from the cracks that the fire made in the bone. Now that life is more complicated, anything but the most complicated forms of divination seems fatuous.

The daddy of them all is astrology: “the ancient world’s most ambitious applied mathematics problem”, according to the science historian Alexander Boxer. There’s a passage in Boxer’s book A Scheme of Heaven describing how a particularly fine observation, made by Hipparchus in 130 BC, depended on his going back over records that must have been many hundreds of years old. Astronomical diaries from the Assyrian library at Nineveh stretch from 652BC to 61BC, making them (as far as we know) the longest continuous research project ever undertaken.

You don’t go to that amount of effort pursuing claims that are clearly false. You do it in pursuit of cosmological regularities that, if you could only isolate them, would bring order and peace to your world. Today’s evangelists for artificial intelligence should take note of Boxer, who writes: “Those of us who are enthusiastic about the promise of numerical data to unlock the secrets of ourselves and our world would do well simply to acknowledge that others have come this way before.”

Astrology has proved adaptable. Classical astrology assumed that we lived in a deterministic world – one in which all events are causally decided by preceding events. You can trace the first cracks in this fixed view of the world all the way back to the medieval Christian church and its pesky insistence on free will (without which one cannot sin).

In spite of powerful Church opposition, astrology clung on in its old form until the Black Death, when its conspicuous failure to predict the death of a third of Europe called time on (nearly) everyone’s credulity. All of a sudden, and with what fleet footwork one can only imagine, horoscopists decided that your fate depended, not just upon your birth date, but also upon when you visited the horoscopist. This muddied the waters wonderfully, and made today’s playful, me-friendly astrologers – particularly popular on TikTok – possible.

***

The problem with trying to relate events to the movement of the planets is not that you won’t find any correlations. The problem is that there are correlations everywhere you look.
And these days, of course, we don’t even have to look: modern machine-learning algorithms are correlation monsters; they can make pretty much any signal correlate with any other. In their recent book AI Snake Oil, computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor spend a good many pages dissecting the promise of predictive artificial intelligence (for instance, statistical software that claims to identify crimes before they have happened). If it fails, it will fail for exactly the same reasons astrology fails – because it’s churning through an ultimately meaningless data set. The authors conclude that immediate dangers from AI “largely stem from… our desperate and untutored keenness for prediction.”

The promise of such mechanical prediction is essentially astrological. We absolutely can use it to predict the future, but only if the world turns out, underneath all that roiling complexity, to be deterministic.

There are some areas in which our predictive powers have improved. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts opened in Reading in 1979. It was able to see three days into the future. Six years later, it could see five days ahead. In 2012 it could see eight days ahead and predicted Hurricane Sandy. By next year it expects to be able to predict high-impact events a fortnight before they happen.

Drunk on achievements in understanding atmospheric physics, some enthusiasts expect to predict human weather using much the same methods. They’re encouraged by numerical analyses that throw up glancing insights into corners of human behaviour. Purchasing trends can predict the ebb and flow of conflict because everyone rushes out to buy supplies in advance of the bombings. Trading algorithms predicted the post-Covid recovery of financial markets weeks before it happened.

Nonetheless, it is a classic error to mistake reality for the analogy you just used to describe it. Political weather is not remotely the same as weather. Still, the dream persists among statistics-savvy self-styled “superforecasters”, who regularly peddle ideas such as “mirror worlds” and “policy flight simulators”, to help us navigate the future of complex economic and social systems.

The danger with such prophecies is not that they are wrong; rather, the danger lies in the power to actually make them come true. Take election polling. Calling the election before it happens heartens leaders, disheartens laggards, and encourages everyone to alter their campaigns to address the anxieties and fears of the moment. Indeed, the easiest, most sure-fire way of predicting the future is to get an iron grip on the present – something the Soviets knew all too well. Then the future becomes, quite literally, what you make it.

There are other dangers, as we increasingly trust predictive technology with our lives. For instance, GPS uses a predictive algorithm in combination with satellite signals to plot our trajectory. And in December last year, a driver followed his satnav through Essex, down a little lane in Great Dunmow called Flitch Way, and straight into the River Chelmer.

We should not assume, just because the oracle is mechanical, that it’s infallible. There’s a story Isaac Asimov wrote in 1955 called Franchise, about a computer that, by chugging through the buzzing confusion of the world, can pinpoint the one individual whose galvanic skin response to random questions reveals which political candidate would be (and therefore is) the winner in any given election.

Because he wants to talk about correlation, computation, and big data, Asimov skates over the obvious point here – that a system like that can never know if it’s broken. And if that’s what certainty looks like, well, I’d sooner gamble.

More believable than the triumph

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Visiting In Event of Moon Disaster at the Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia, for the Telegraph, 16 February 2024

20:05 GMT on 20 July 1969: astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are aboard Apollo l1’s Lunar Command Module, dropping steadily towards the lunar surface in humankind’s first attempt to visit another world.

“Drifting to the right a little,” Buzz remarks — and then an alarm goes off, and then another, and another, until at last the transmission breaks down.

The next thing we see is a desk set in front of a blue curtain, and flanked by flags: the Stars and Stripes, and the Presidential seal. Richard Nixon, the US President, takes his seat and catches the eye of figures hovering off-screen: is everything ready?

And so he begins; it’s a speech no one can or will forget. It was written by his speechwriter, William Safire, as a contingency in the event that Buzz and Neil land on the Moon in a way that leaves them alive but doomed, stranded without hope of rescue in the Sea of Tranquility.

“These brave men… know that there is no hope for their recovery.” Nixon swallows hard. “But they also know that there is hope for Mankind in their sacrifice.”

From 17 February, Richard Nixon’s speech will play to visitors to the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich. They will watch it from the comfort of a 1960s-era sofa, in a living room decked out in such a way as to transport them back to that day, in June 1969, when two heroes found themselves doomed and alone and sure to die on the Moon.

Confronted with Nixon struggling to control his emotions on a period TV, they may well ask themselves if what they are seeing is real. The props are real, and so is the speech, marking and mourning the death of two American heroes. Richard Nixon is real, or as real as anyone can be on TV. His voice and gestures are his own (albeit — and we’ll come to this in a moment — strung together by generative computer algorithms).

Will anyone be fooled?

Not me. I can remember Apollo 11’s successful landing, and the crew’s triumphant return to Earth less than a week later, on 24 July. But, hang on — what, exactly, do I remember? I was two. If my parents had told me, over and over, that they had sat me down in front of TV coverage of the Kennedy assassination, I would probably have come to believe that, too. Memory is unreliable, and people are suggestible.

Jago Cooper includes the installation In Event of Moon Disaster in the Sainsbury Centre’s exhibition “What Is Truth”. Cooper, who directs the centre, wasn’t even born when Apollo 11 rose from the launchpad. Neither were the two filmmakers, Halsey Burgund and Francesca Panetta, who won a 2021 Emmy for In Event Of Moon Disaster in the category of Interactive Media Documentary. The bottom line here seems to be: the past exists only because we trust what others say about it.

Other exhibits in the “What is Truth?” season will come at the same territory from different angles. There are artworks about time and artworks about identity. In May, an exhibition entitled The Camera Never Lies uses war photography from a private collection, The Incite Project, to reveal how a few handfuls of images have shaped our narratives of conflict. This is the other thing to remember, as we contemplate a world awash with deepfakes and avatars: the truth has always been up for grabs.

Sound artist Halsey Burgund and artist-technologist Francesca Panetta recruited experts in Israel and Ukraine to help realise In Event Of Moon Disaster. Actor Louis Wheeler spent days in a studio, enacting Nixon’s speech; the President’s face, posture and mannerisms were assembled from archive footage of a speech about Vietnam.

President Nixon’s counterfactual TV eulogy was produced by the MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality to highlight the malleability of digital images. It’s been doing the rounds of art galleries and tech websites since 2019, and times have moved on to some degree. Utter the word “deepfake” today and you’re less likely to conjure up images of a devastated Richard Nixon as gossip about those pornographic deepfake images of Taylor Swift, viewed 27 million times in 19 hours when they were circulated this January on Twitter.

No-one imagines for second that Swift had anything to do with them, of course, so let’s be positive here: MIT’s message about not believing everything you see is getting through.

As a film about deepfakes, In Event of Moon Disaster is strangely reassuring. It’s a work of genuine creative brilliance. It’s playful: we feel warmer towards Richard Nixon in this difficult fictional moment than we probably ever felt about him in life. It’s educational: the speech, though it never had to be delivered (thank God), is real enough, an historical document that reveals how much was at stake on that day. And in a twisted way, the film is immensely respectful, singing the praises of extraordinary men in terms only tragedy can adequately articulate.

As a film about the Moon, though, In Event of Moon Disaster is a very different kettle of fish and frankly disturbing. You can’t help but feel, having watched it, that Burgund and Panetta’s synthetic moon disaster is more believable than Apollo’s actual, historical triumph.

The novelist Norman Mailer observed early on that “in another couple of years there will be people arguing in bars about whether anyone even went to the Moon.” And so it came to pass: claims that the moon landings were fake began the moment the Apollo missions ended in 1972.

The show’s curator Jago Cooper has a theory about this: “The Moon is such a weird bloody thing,” he says. “The idea that we merely pretended to walk about there is more believable than what actually happened. That’s the thing about our relationship with what we’re told: it has to be believable within our lived experience, or we start driving wedges into it that undermine its credibility.”

This raises a nasty possibility: that the more enormous our adventures, the less likely we are to believe them; and the crazier our world, the less attention we’ll pay to it. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality” said TS Eliot, and maybe we’re beginning to understand why.

For a start, we cannot bear too much information. The more we’re told about the world, the more we search for things that are familiar. In an essay accompanying the exhibition, curator Paul Luckraft finds us in thrall to confirmation bias “because we can’t see what’s new in the dizzying amount of text, image, video and audio fragments available to us.”

The deluge of information brought about by digital culture is already being weaponised — witness Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who observed in 2018, ‘The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
Even more disturbing: the world of shifting appearances ushered in by Bannon, Trump, Putin et al. might be the saving of us. In a recent book about the future of nuclear warfare, Deterrence under Uncertainty, RAND policy researcher Edward Geist conjures up a likely media-saturated future in which we all know full well that appearances are deceptive, but no-one has the faintest idea what is actually going on. Belligerents in such a world would never have to fire a shot in anger, says Geist, merely persuade the enemy that their adversary’s values are better than their own.

“Tricky Dick” Nixon would flourish in such a hyper-paranoid world, but then, so might we all. Imagine that perpetual peace is ours for the taking — so long as we abandon the faith in facts that put men on the Moon!

Fifty years ago you’d have struggled to find a anyone casting doubt on NASA’s achievement, that day in July 1969. Fifty years later, a YouGov poll found sixteen per cent of the British public believed the moon landing most likely never happened.

Deepfakes themselves aren’t the cause of such incredulity, but they have the potential to exacerbate it immeasurably — and this, says Halsey Burgund, is why he and Francesca Panetta were inspired to make In Event of Moon Disaster. “The hope of the project is to provide some simple awareness of this kind of technology, its ubiquity and out-there-ness,” he explains. “If we’ve made an aesthetically satisfying and emotional piece, so much the better — it’ll help people internalise the challenges facing us right now.” Though bullish in defence of the technology’s artistic possibilities, Burgund concedes that the harms it can wreak are real, and can be distributed at scale. (Ask Taylor Swift.) “It’s not as though intelligent people aren’t addressing these problems,” Burgund says. “But it takes a lot of time — and society can’t change that quickly.”

We’re building sandcastles

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Visiting Fantasy: Realms of Imagination at the British Library, for the Telegraph, 27 October 2023

Trees shimmer behind black gothic arches, beckoning the visitor through the British Library’s latest exhibition, an exploration of fantastic books, maps, images and imagined worlds, mixing rare editions with boardgames, autograph manuscripts, graphic novels, sketchbooks and video interviews.

Though there’s much pleasure to be had among the manuscripts (Monty Python and the Holy Grail began as a shopping list of running gags), inevitably, the paper archive gutters out at around the advent of the word processor. This upset me, though the scrawled red biroid horror that is Alan Garner’s manuscript for The Owl Service (1967) largely reconciled me to the march of progress. Past the mid-eighties, board games, role-playing games and videogames fill the gap left by the missing materiality of literary production.

Nonetheless this show advances an idea of fantasy that is primarily literary. Writers being ornery creatures, it’s a genre robust enough to resist its own cosy commodification. Gandalf’s staff and Arya Stark’s smallsword and other props are here as evidence of worldbuilding exercises that, even at Hollywood scale, are supposed to be ephemeral, vulnerable to parody and the passage of time and taste, to borrowing and, especially, these days, to the corrosive practices of ”weird” writers like M. John Harrison, N. K. Jemisin or China Mieville. The point (which was surely lost on the Amazon executives who sanctioned that flopbusting “Rings of Power” series) is that we’re building sandcastles here; and the tide is always coming in.

I’m not convinced that modern fantasy in anyway deepens or realises the potential of ancient folktales. Writers are more venal than that, and steal what they need for their own purposes. Still, the whig history this show offers — in which folk tales evolved into fairy stories, which evolved into metaphysical yarns, which have at last evolved into epic fantasies of the Game of Thrones sort — at least makes for a crystal-clear narrative, and a good excuse to rub, say, Charlotte Bronte’s spider-thin penmanship up against Ursula Le Guin’s muddy yet evocative pencil sketches, or the antic spiritual unease of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) up against the fantastical politics of Ken Liu’s “Dandelion Dynasty” books, written over a century later.

Is fantasy “escapist”? The genre enthusiasts interviewed in the thankfully brief “fandom” room at the end of the show seem to think so. Through fantasy, you can be whatever you want to be — this seems to be the idea, though it wouldn’t last you five minutes in Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, or in any tale by the brothers Grimm.

Are the faeries at the bottom of the garden kind? Are the gods listening? Is that letter at the bottom of the trunk to be trusted? Are you my Mother, or my button-eyed Other Mother? Fantasy may appear infantile, but visit this exhibition and you will discover that it’s protean, which is a very different proposition. It’s reality with the skein of habit torn away, in all its wonder and horror.

“The white race cannot survive without dairy products”

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Visiting Milk at London’s Wellcome Collection. For the Telegraph, 29 March 2023

So — have you ever drunk a mother’s milk? As an adult, I mean. Maybe you’re a body-builder, following an alternative health fad; maybe you’re a fetishist; or you happened to stumble into the “milk bar” operated now and again by performance artist Jess Dobkin, whose specially commissioned installation For What It’s Worth — an “unruly archive” of milk as product, labour and value —
brings the latest exhibition at London’s Wellcome Collection to a triumphant, chaotic and decidedly bling climax.

Why is breast milk such a source of anxiety, disgust, fascination and even horror? (In Sarah Pucill’s 1995 video Backcomb, on show here, masses of dark, animated hair slither across a white tablecloth, upturning containers of milk, cream and butter.)

Curators Marianne Templeton and Honor Beddard reckon our unease has largely to do with the way we have learned to associate milk almost entirely with cow’s milk, which we now consume on an industrial scale. It’s no accident that, as you enter their show, an obligatory Instagram moment is provided by Julia Bornefeld’s enormous hanging sculpture, suggestive at once of a cow’s udders and a human breast.

Milk is also about Whiteness. In “Butter. Vital for Growth and Health”, an otherwise unexceptionable pamphlet from the National Dairy Council in Chicago (one of the hundred or so objects rubbing shoulders here with artworks and new commissions), there’s a rather rather peculiar foreword by Herbert Hoover, the man who was to become the 31st U.S. President. “The white race,” Hoover writes, “cannot survive without dairy products.”

Say what?

Hoover (if you didn’t know) was put in charge of the American Relief Administration after the first World War, and saw to the food supply for roughly 300 million people in 21 countries in Europe and the Middle East. Even after government funding dried up, the ARA still managed to feed 25 to 35 million people during Russia’s famine of 1921-22 — which remains the largest famine relief operation in world history.

So when Hoover, who knows a lot about famine, says dairy is essential to the white race, he’s not being malign or sectarian; he believes this to be literally true — and this exhibition goes a very long way to explaining why.

Large portions of the world’s population react to milk the way my cat does, and for the same reason — they can’t digest the lactose. This hardly makes dairy a “White” food unless, like Hoover, your terms of reference were set by eugenics; or perhaps because, like some neo-Nazis in contemporary USA, you see your race in terminal decline, and whole milk as the only honest energy drink available in your 7-11. (Hewillnotdivide.us, Luke Turner’s 2017 video of drunk, out-of-condition MAGA fascists, chugging the white stuff and ranting on about purity, is the least assuming of this show’s artistic offerings, but easily the most compelling.)

Milk also asks how dairy became both an essential superfood and arguably the biggest source of hygiene anxiety in the western diet. Through industry promotional videos, health service leaflets, meal plans and a dizzying assortment of other ephemera, Milk explains how the choice to distribute milk at scale to a largely urban population led to the growth of an extraordinary industry, necessarily obsessed with disinfection and ineluctably driven toward narrow norms and centralised distribution; an industry that once had us convinced that milk is not just good for people, but is in fact essential (and hard cheese (sorry) to the hordes who can’t digest it).

The current kerfuffle around dairy and its vegan alternatives generates far more heat than light. If one show could pour oil on these troubled waters (which I doubt), it isn’t this one. No one will walk out of this show feeling comfortable. But they will have been royally entertained.

So that was me told

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Visiting Voyage to the Edge of Imagination at London’s Science Museum, 9 November 2022

London’s Science Museum has come up with a solution to the age-old problem of how to keep visitors from bunching up while they tour an exhibition. At an awkward corner of Science Fiction: Voyage to the edge of imagination, ALANN (for Algorithmic Artificial Neural Network) announces that all the air is about to leave the room (sorry: “deck”). To avoid the hard vacuum of outer space, please move along.

Little fillips of jeopardy enliven this whistle-stop tour of science, technology and imagination — not a show about science fiction (and in fact London’s had one of those quite recently: the Barbican’s superb 2017 Into the Unknown) so much as a show that does science fiction. The gallery is arranged as a story, which begins once a Pan Galactic Starlines shuttle drops us aboard a friendly if bemused alien craft, the Azimuth. The Azimuth’s resident AI is orbiting the Earth and pondering the curious nature of human progress, that puts imagination and storytelling ahead of practical action. It seems to ALANN — who jumps from screen to screen, keeping us company throughout — that using stories to imagine the future is a weirdly double-edged way of going about things. Humans could just as easily be steering towards nightmares, as toward happy outcomes. What will their future hold?

ALANN bottles it in the end, of course — our destiny turns out to be “uncomputable”. Oh for a show that had punters running screaming for the exits! Isn’t that what sf is for?

Assembled on a conspicuously low budget, and featuring mainly film props and costumes (which at the best of times never look that good in real life) and replicas (some of them jolly cheap), this “voyage to the edge of imagination” stands or falls by its wits. Next to a cheery video about trying to communicate with humpback whales as a rehearsal for alien “first contact”, some bright spark has placed a life-size xenomorph from the film Alien. Iron Man’s helmet is there to promote our eventual cyborgisation, melding metal and flesh to better handle the technological future — but so, mind you, is Darth Vader’s. The sheer lack of stuff here is disconcerting, but at the end of it all we have explored space, bent spacetime, communicated with aliens, and become posthuman, so clearly something is working. Imagine an excellent nest constructed from three sticks.

What this show might have achieved with a bigger budget is revealed in Glyn Morgan’s excellent accompanying book (Thames and Hudson, £30) featuring interviews with the likes of Charlie Jane Anders and Chen Qiufan.

This being the Science Museum, it’s hardly surprising that the exhibition’s final spaces are given over to pondering science fiction’s utility. Futurologist Brian David Johnson is on screen to explain how fiction can be used to prototype ideas in the real world. (Actual science fiction writers have a word for this: they call it “plagiarism”.) Whether you give credence to Johnson’s belief that sf is there to make the world a better place is a glass-half-full, glass-half-empty sort of question. “Applied science fiction” can be jolly crass. In a cabinet near Mr Johnson are a couple of copies of Marvel’s Captain Planet. In the 1990s, we are told, Captain Planet “empowered a new generation to be environmentally aware.” As someone who was there, I can promise you he jolly well didn’t.

But as I turned the next corner, the sneer still on my lips, I confronted as fine an example of imagination in action as you could wish for: Tilly Lockey, a couple of days off her seventeenth birthday, had been invited along to the press launch, and was skipping about like a dervish, taking photographs of her friend. In the gloom, I couldn’t quite see which bionic arms she was wearing — the ones based on the Deus Ex video game series, or the ones she’d received in 2019, designed by the team creating Alita: Battle Angel.

So that was me told.

How to appropriate a plant

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Visiting “Rooted Beings” at Wellcome Collection, London for the Telegraph, 24 March 2022

“Take a moment to draw a cosmic breath with your whole body, slower than any breath you have ever taken in your life.” Over headphones, Eduardo Navarro and philosopher Michael Marder guide my contemplation of Navarro’s drawings, where human figures send roots into the ground and reach with hands-made-leaves into the sky. They’re drawn with charcoal and natural pigments on envelopes containing the seeds of London plane trees. When the exhibition is over, the envelopes will be planted in a rite of burial and rebirth.

What are plants? Garden-centre curios? Magical objects? Medicines? Or trade goods? It’s hard for us to think of plants outside of the uses we put them to, and the five altars of Vegetal Matrix by Chilean artist Patricia Dominguez celebrate (if that is quite the word) their multiple social identities. One shrine contains a medicinal bark, quinine; in another, flowers of toxic Brugmansia, an assassin’s stock-in-trade; In the third sits a mandrake root, carved into the shape of a woman. Dominguez’s artistic research sits at the centre of a section of the exhibition entitled “Colonial violence and indigenous knowledge”.

Going by the show’s interpretative material, the narrowly extractive use of plants is a white western idea. But the most exciting exhibits reveal otherwise. From 400 CE there’s a fragment of the world’s earliest surviving herbal, painted on papyrus (we have always admired plants for what we could get out of them). Also from the Wellcome archives, there’s a complex map describing the vegetal “middle realm” of Jain cosmology — obviously a serious effort to establish an intellectual hold on the blooming and buzzing confusion of the plant world. Trees and their associated wildlife are reduced to deceptively simple and captivating shapes in the work on paper of the artist Joseca, whose people, the Yanomami, have been extracting foods and medicines from the Amazon rainforest for generations. His vivid plant portraits are not some classic Linnaean effort at the classification of species, but emotionally they’re not far off. Joseca is establishing categories, not tearing them down.

Bracketing the section about how imperial forces have “appropriated” useful plants (and thank goodness for that! cries the crabbed reviewer, thinking of his stomach as usual) are more introspective spaces. Ingela Ihrman’s enormous Passion Flower costume dominates the first room: time your visit just right, and you will find the artist inhabiting the flower, and may even get to drink her nectar. Not much less playful are the absurdist visions — in textile, embroidery and collage — of Gözde Ilkin, for whom categories (between human and plant, between plant and fungi) exist to be demolished, creating peculiar, and peculiarly endearing vegetal-anthropoid forms.

“Wilderness” is the theme of the final room. There’s real desperation in the RESOLVE Collective’s effort to knap and chisel their way towards a wild relationship with the urban environment. Made of broken masonry and pipework, crates and split paving slabs, this, perhaps, is a glimpse of the Hobbesian wilderness that civilisation keeps at bay.

Nearby, Den 3 is the artist SOP’s wry evocation of the old romantic mistake, cladding misanthropy in the motley of the greenwood. Rather than vegetate on the couch during the Covid-19 pandemic, SOP built a den in nearby woods and there enjoyed a sort of pint-size “Walden Pond” experience — until lockdown relaxed and others began visiting the wood.

At its simplest, Rooted Beings evokes a pleasant fantasy of human-vegetable co-existence. But forget its emolient exterior: at its best this show is deeply uncanny. The gulfs that exist between plant and animal, between species and species, between us and other, serve their own purposes, and attempts to do as Navarro and Marder suggest, and experience the world as a plant might experience it, are as likely to end in horror as in delight. “As you are very slowly dying while also staying alive,” they explain, “your body becomes the soil you are living in.” Crikey.

82.8 per cent perfect

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Visiting Amazonia at London’s Science Museum for the Telegraph, 13 October 2021

The much-garlanded Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado is at London’s Science Museum to launch a seven-plus-years-in-the-making exhibition of photographs from Amazônia — and, not coincidentally, there’s barely a fortnight to go before the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference convenes in Glasgow.

Salgado speaks to the urgency of the moment. We must save the Amazon rainforest for many reasons, but chiefly because the world’s rainfall patterns depend on it. We should stop buying Amazonian wood; we should stop buying beef fed on Amazonian soya; we should stop investing in companies who have interests in Amazonian mining.

There are only so many ways to say these things, and only so many times a poor mortal can hear them. On the face of it, Salgado’s enormous exhibition, set to an immersive soundscape by Seventies new-age pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre, sounds more impressive than impactful. Selgado is everyone’s idea of an engaged artist — his photographs of workers at the Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil are world-famous — but is it even in us, now, to feel more concerned about the rainforest?

Turns out that it is. Jarre’s music plays a significant part in this show, curated and designed by Sebastiao’s wife Lelia Wanick Salgado. Assembled from audio archives in Geneva, it manages to be both politely ambient and often quite frightening in its dizzying assemblage of elemental roars (touches of Jóhann Jóhannsson, there), bird calls, forest sounds and human voices. And Selgado’s epic visions of the Amazon more than earn such Stürm und Drang.

This is not an exhibition about the 17.2 per cent of the rainforest that is already lost us. It’s not about logging companies or soy farms, gold mines or cattle ranches. It’s about what’s left. Ecologically the region’s losses are catastrophic; but there’s still plenty to save and, for a photographer, plenty to see.

Here, rendered in Selgado’s exquisitely detailed, thumpingly immediate monochrome, is Anavilhanas, the world’s largest freshwater archipelago, a wetland so complex and mutable, no-one has ever been able to settle there. There are mountains, “inselbergs”, rising out of the forest like volcanic islands in some fantastical South China Sea. There are bravura performances of the developer’s art: rivers turned to tin-foil, and leaves turned to photographic grain, and rainstorms turned to atom-bomb explosions, and clouds caught at angles that reveal what they truly are: airborn rivers. As they spill over the edge of Brazil, they dump more moisture into the Atlantic than the mighty Amazon itself.

Dotted about the exhibition space are oval “forest shelters”: dwellings for intimate portraits of twelve different forest peoples. Selgado acknowledges this anthropological effort merely scratches the surface: Amazonia’s 192 distinct groups constitute the most culturally and linguistically diverse region on the planet. Capturing and communicating that diversity conveys the scale of the region even better than those cloud shots.

The Ashaninka used to trade with the Incas. When the Spanish came, their supreme god Pawa turned all the wise men into animals to keep the region’s secrets. The highland Korubo (handy with a war club) became known as mud people, lathering themselves with the stuff against mosquitoes whenever they came down off their hill. The Zo’é place nuts in the mouths of the wild pigs they have killed so the meal can join in with its own feast. The Suruwahá quite happily consume the deadly spear-tip toxin timbó, figuring its better to die young and healthy (and many do).

The more we explore, the more we find it’s the profound and sometimes disturbing differences between these peoples that matter; not their surface exoticism. In the end, faced with such extraordinary diversity, we can only look in the mirror and admit our own oddness, and with it our kinship. We, too — this is the show’s deepest lesson — are, in every possible regard, like the playful, charming, touching, sometimes terrifying subjects of Selgado’s portraits, quite impossibly strange.

Sod provenance

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Is the digital revolution that Pixar began with Toy Story stifling art – or saving it? An article for the Telegraph, 24 July 2021

In 2011 the Westfield shopping mall in Stratford, East London, acquired a new public artwork: a digital waterfall by the Shoreditch-based Jason Bruges Studio. The liquid-crystal facets of the 12 metre high sculpture form a subtle semi-random flickering display, as though water were pouring down its sides. Depending on the shopper’s mood, this either slakes their visual appetite, or leaves them gasping for a glimpse of real rocks, real water, real life.

Over its ten-year life, Bruges’s piece has gone from being a comment about natural processes (so soothing, so various, so predictable!) to being a comment about digital images, a nagging reminder that underneath the apparent smoothness of our media lurks the jagged line and the stair-stepped edge, the grid, the square: the pixel, in other words.

We suspect that the digital world is grainier than the real, coarser, more constricted, and stubbornly rectilinear. But this is a prejudice, and one that’s neatly punctured by a new book by electrical engineer and Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith, “A Biography of the Pixel”. This eccentric work traces the intellectual genealogy of Toy Story (Pixar’s first feature-length computer animation in 1995) over bump-maps and around occlusions, along traced rays and through endless samples, computations and transformations, back to the mathematics of the eighteenth century.

Smith’s whig history is a little hard to take — as though, say, Joseph Fourier’s efforts in 1822 to visualise how heat passed through solids were merely a way-station on the way to Buzz Lightyear’s calamitous launch from the banister rail — but it’s a superb short-hand in which to explain the science.

We can use Fourier’s mathematics to record an image as a series of waves. (Visual patterns, patterns of light and shade and movement, “can be represented by the voltage patterns in a machine,” Smith explains.) And we can recreate these waves, and the image they represent, with perfect fidelity, so long as we have a record of the points at the crests and troughs of each wave.

The locations of these high- and low-points, recorded as numerical coordinates, are pixels. (The little dots you see if you stare far too closely at your computer screen are not pixels; strictly speaking, they’re “display elements”.)

Digital media do not cut up the world into little squares. (Only crappy screens do that). They don’t paint by numbers. On the contrary, they faithfully mimic patterns in the real world.

This leads Smith to his wonderfully upside-down-sounding catch-line: “Reality,” he says, ”is just a convenient measure of complexity.”

Once pixels are converted to images on a screen, they can be used to create any world, rooted in any geometry, and obeying any physics. And yet these possibilities remain largely unexplored. Almost every computer animation is shot through a fictitious “camera lens”, faithfully recording a Euclidean landscape. Why are digital animations so conservative?

I think this is the wrong question: its assumptions are faulty. I think the ability to ape reality at such high fidelity creates compelling and radical possibilities of its own.

I discussed some of these possibilities with Paul Franklin, co-founder of the SFX company DNEG, and who won Oscars for his work on Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi blockbusters Interstellar (2014) and Inception (2010). Franklin says the digital technologies appearing on film sets in the past decade — from lighter cameras and cooler lights to 3-D printed props and LED front-projection screens — are positively disrupting the way films are made. They are making film sets creative spaces once again, and giving the director and camera crew more opportunities for on-the-fly creative decision making. “We used a front-projection screen on the film Interstellar, so the actors could see what visual effects they were supposed to be responding to,” he remembers. “The actors loved being able to see the super-massive black hole they were supposed to be hurtling towards. Then we realised that we could capture an image of the rotating black hole’s disc reflecting in Matthew McConaughey’s helmet: now that’s not the sort of shot you plan.”

Now those projection screens are interactive. Franklin explains: “Say I’m looking down a big corridor. As I move the camera across the screen, instead of it flattening off and giving away the fact that it’s actually just a scenic backing, the corridor moves with the correct perspective, creating the illusion of a huge volume of space beyond the screen itself.“

Effects can be added to a shot in real-time, and in full view of cast and crew. More to the point, what the director sees through their viewfinder is what the audience gets. This encourages the sort of disciplined and creative filmmaking Melies and Chaplin would recognise, and spells an end to the deplorable industry habit of kicking important creative decisions into the long grass of post-production.

What’s taking shape here isn’t a “good enough for TV” reality. This is a “good enough to reveal truths” reality. (Gargantua, the spinning black hole at Interstellar’s climax, was calculated and rendered so meticulously, it ended up in a paper for the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.) In some settings, digital facsimile is becoming, literally, a replacement reality.

In 2012 the EU High Representative Baroness Ashton gave a physical facsimile of the burial chamber of Tutankhamun to the people of Egypt. The digital studio responsible for its creation, Factum Foundation, has been working in the Valley of the Kings since 2001, creating ever-more faithful copies of places that were never meant to be visited. They also print paintings (by Velasquez, by Murillo, by Raphael…) that are indistinguishable from the originals.

From the perspective of this burgeoning replacement reality, much that is currently considered radical in the art world appears no more than a frantic shoring-up of old ideas and exhausted values. A couple of days ago Damien Hirst launched The Currency, a physical set of dot paintings the digitally tokenised images of which can be purchased, traded, and exchanged for the real paintings.

Eventually the purchaser has to choose whether to retain the token, or trade it in for the physical picture. They can’t own both. This, says Hirst, is supposed to challenge the concept of value through money and art. Every participant is confronted with their perception of value, and how it influences their decision.

But hang on: doesn’t money already do this? Isn’t this what money actually is?

It can be no accident that non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which make bits of the internet ownable, have emerged even as the same digital technologies are actually erasing the value of provenance in the real world. There is nothing sillier, or more dated looking, than the Neues Museum’s scan of its iconic bust of Nefertiti, released free to the public after a complex three-year legal battle. It comes complete with a copyright license in the bottom of the bust itself — a copyright claim to the scan of a 3,000-year-old sculpture created 3,000 miles away.

Digital technologies will not destroy art, but they will erode and ultimately extinguish the value of an artwork’s physical provenance. Once facsimiles become indistinguishable from originals, then originals will be considered mere “first editions”.

Of course literature has thrived for many centuries in such an environment; why should the same environment damage art? That would happen only if art had somehow already been reduced to a mere vehicle for financial speculation. As if!

 

Dispersing the crowds

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Considering the fate of museums and galleries under covid laockdown for New Scientist, 3 February 2021

In November 2020, the International Council of Museums estimated that 6.1 per cent of museums globally were resigned to permanent closure due to the pandemic. The figure was welcomed with enthusiasm: in May, it had reported nearly 13 per cent faced demise.

Something is changing for the better. This isn’t a story about how galleries and museums have used technology to save themselves during lockdowns (many didn’t try; many couldn’t afford to try; many tried and failed). But it is a story of how they weathered lockdowns and ongoing restrictions by using tech to future-proof themselves.

One key tool turned out to be virtual tours. Before 2020, they were under-resourced novelties; quickly, they became one of the few ways for galleries and museums to engage with the public. The best is arguably one through the Tomb of Pharaoh Ramses VI, by the Egyptian Tourism Authority and Cairo-based studio VRTEEK.

And while interfaces remain clunky, they improved throughout the year, as exhibition-goers can see in the 360-degree virtual tour created by the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent in Belgium to draw people through its otherwise-mothballed Van Eyck exhibition.

The past year has also forced the hands of curators, pushing them into uncharted territory where the distinctions between the real and the virtual become progressively more ambiguous.

With uncanny timing, the V&A in London had chosen Lewis Carroll’s Alice books for its 2020 summer show. Forced into the virtual realm by covid-19 restrictions, the V&A, working with HTC Vive Arts, created a VR game based in Wonderland, where people can follow their own White Rabbit, solve the caterpillar’s mind-bending riddles, visit the Queen of Hearts’ croquet garden and more. Curious Alice is available through Viveport; the real-world show is slated to open on 27 March.

Will museums grow their online experiences into commercial offerings? Almost all such tours are free at the moment, or are used to build community. If this format is really going to make an impact, it will probably have to develop a consolidated subscription service – a sort of arts Netflix or Spotify.

What the price point should be is anyone’s guess. It doesn’t help for institutions to muddy the waters by calling their video tours virtual tours.

But the advantages are obvious. The crowded conditions in galleries and museums have been miserable for years – witness the Mona Lisa, imprisoned behind bulletproof glass under low-level diffuse lighting and protected by barricades. Art isn’t “available” in any real sense when you can only spend 10 seconds with a piece. I can’t be alone in having staggered out of some exhibitions with no clear idea of what I had seen or why. Imagine if that was your first experience of fine art.

Why do we go to museums and galleries expecting to see originals? The Victorians didn’t. They knew the value of copies and reproductions. In the US in particular, museums lacked “real” antiquities, and plaster casts were highly valued. The casts aren’t indistinguishable from the original, but what if we produced copies that were exact in information as well as appearance? As British art critic Jonathan Jones says: “This is not a new age of fakery. It’s a new era of knowledge.”

With lidar, photogrammetry and new printing techniques, great statues, frescoes and chapels can be recreated anywhere. This promises to spread the crowds and give local museums and galleries a new lease of life. At last, they can become places where we think about art – not merely gawp at it.