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Science Fantasy
by Joshua Glenn| Boston, USA
Friday, 12 November 2010
tags: americas, brand worlds, consumer culture, contributions from, culture, disciplines, header navigation, lateral navigation, making sense, semiotics
This week, Semionaut looks at soft science coding.
The third of British science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke's Laws of Prediction is the most widely quoted one: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. [1] In US communications, Clarke's third law is scrupulously observed in advertisements for beauty products of all sorts, which use science-fantasy imagery — e.g., high-tech products whose packs glow from within, black-box technologies emerging from a void — to bolster brands' "proof points."
Scientists and engineers surely find such romanticist, counter-Enlightenment, non- or even anti-positivistic signifiers for advanced technology laughable — or perhaps outrageous. And yet high-tech products and services from computer, energy, IT, and mobile telephony companies, among others, are also marketed, in the US, with the aid of exactly similar science-fantasy signifiers. Ads for the no-cords Powermat feature glowing black-box technologies perched atop a glowing black-box technology; ads for Sprint's HTC Touch Pro show an energy beam snaking around a smartphone. And now IBM, a brand known for its no-nonsense rationalism, has gone science-fantasy.
In "Data Baby," one of seven endlessly watchable TV spots recently directed for IBM by Mathew Cullen, data (the baby's heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, blood pressure, ECG, temperature) envelops and surrounds a newborn in a neonatal ward, forming a protective shell/blanket/mobile — we might even think of it as bathwater. It's magical — no, wait, it's science! It's the human touch — no, wait, it's hyper-advanced technology! What a compelling fantasy, indeed.
Motion Theory's Angela Zhu, who art-directed the spot, articulated the oxymoron at the heart of science-fantasy when she told FXGuide, "The data had to be very fragile and humane. The difficulty was to find the balance between technology and humanity… The data blanket had to feel like a mother's finger running over a baby's face — the fragile love and protection is hard to recreate with technology. Technology is informational, humanity is emotional." Meanwhile, the ad's visual effects supervisor, John Fragomeni, expressed the same oxymoron from his own discipline's perspective: "It was important to show how the data was interacting with the baby. It couldn't be threatening in any way, it had to be comforting. … The data that came off the baby was meant to be very organic, rather than like a digitized baby. In the early days we had the data much closer to the skin, but when you're working that close, we found we needed to lift it further and further off the skin because it started to feel like a digital tattoo."
Now that Big Blue's marketing has gone the science-fantasy route, humanized science coding no longer feels particularly emergent, in US culture and communications. (So what science coding is emergent? Ironically, perhaps it's what IBM used to be known for: cold, inhuman, unemotional, inorganic, even threatening science/technology coding.) However, it should be noted that there are two codes at work in "Data Baby": the baby (humanized science) and the data (patterns emerging from ultra-complex info-sets). Let's not throw the bathwater out with the baby.
15 December 2010 at 1:56 pm
Joshua Glenn says:
Welcome Gearfuse readers!
23 November 2010 at 6:37 am
TH says:
Good!
Science is of course nothing more than arriving at knowledge through observation. While this stereotypically sounds mechanical and inhuman, it arises, rather, from conjunctions of simple perception, structured testing, and imagination. Imagination and creativity are vital to the greatest leaps of scientific knowledge and understanding. At the same time, while the “truest” science has never claimed to know “the truth” it is always seeking that asymptote.
In “The Act of Creation,” Arthur Koestler posits that, in one sense, creativity is the linking of two notions that were previously considered disparate, to arrive at a new frontier. Science requires envisioning specific possibilities, or at least being open thereto, to see patterns, trends and connections. Science, then, involves and evokes some of the most human traits. It hinges on creation, and wonder.
In many cases, science demand other intensely human attributes, such as empathy and communication. Medicine, for instance, has always tread along the boundaries between science/fantasy, technology/emotion, while providing so much basic research, and “goods in terms of general prosperity [more years of productivity], health [vaccines, clean water and antibiotics, anyone?], and diversion [well, okay, we shouldn’t mention ‘Scrubs’ or ‘House’ here]” that it’s mind-boggling. Medicine is perhaps the oldest “humanized science”. There are a number of great books here.
Of course, then, advertisers looking to hit just this complex note of technical and emotional, hard and soft, important yet touching, would look to medical applications of technology, yes?
15 November 2010 at 2:24 pm
Josh Glenn says:
I’m looking into emergent expressions of humanized science, too, Louise — these are great tips. I’ve been meaning to read “The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature,” a recent book by science writer Timothy Ferris which claims that the crucial “innovative ingredient” that sparked the 18th century revolution in democratic governance and individual rights was science. In fact, he sounds a lot like Marx or Fredric Jameson when he claims that these humanistic advances were epiphenomenal to scientific and technological advances — i.e., the spread of modern principles of liberty derives in large measure from the capacity of modern industrial democracies to deliver the goods in terms of general prosperity, health, and diversion. Interesting stuff.
14 November 2010 at 6:46 am
Louise says:
I think humanised science coding may be still going strong in the UK, but splitting off into different directions. The recent TV series ‘Wonders of the Solar System’ is an interesting place to go for science codes.
One code that’s going on there could be called ‘barefoot science’ – demonstrations in the earth, drawing diagrams with twigs, and using pebbles to illustrate planetary orbits, that kind of thing.
Another one you can see in that series is Romanticised science – linking up science with poetry and religion to go back to a very Romantic vocabulary of ‘wonder’, almost Kantian starry skies territory.
13 November 2010 at 3:11 pm
dollymix says:
It’s a pity the ad itself is rather ridiculous, because the Black Moth Super Rainbow song soundtracking it (“Boatfriend”) is wonderful.